Arnaud Chastaingt thinks the spotlight should be on his designs, not on him.
Last year Chanel promoted a reworked version of its distinctive J12 watch with advertisements featuring a handful of high-profile celebrities, including Ali McGraw, Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer. Arnaud Chastaingt, the designer who updated the timepiece, is decidedly less recognizable, which is exactly how he likes things. “I prefer when people speak about my creations than about me,” he said in a telephone interview from his office above the brand’s watch and fine jewelry boutique on Paris’s Place Vendôme. In spite of his deliberately low profile, Mr. Chastaingt [pronounced shas-tawn, with equal emphasis on each syllable],40, has worked on many noteworthy watches since he joined Chanel in 2013 as director of the brand’s Watchmaking Creation Studio. Some, like the J12, are revised takes on existing designs at the house, which first introduced watches in 1987. Others are his conceptions, like the Boy. Friend, a subdued women’s tank style from 2015, and Monsieur de Chanel, which was introduced the following year as the brand’s first timepiece aimed at men. Mr. Chastaingt’s watches often incorporate motifs that are emblematic of the brand, like a quilting detail that suggests a classic 2.55 handbag or a tweed pattern that might have appeared on one of Coco Chanel’s jackets. Those elements, while impossible to overlook, tend not to be showy. His touch is typically less emphatic than that of Chanel’s designers in other categories, where, say, a chain-strapped bag or bouclé women’s suit, even without a logo, has semiotic branding. “All the creators who work for Chanel use the same vocabulary,” he said. “It’s true that we may have a different interpretation of these codes, of the vocabulary.” “Our work,” he added, “is to find a good balance between the past and the future. The most dangerous thing for a designer is to look only in the past.” Still, Mr. Chastaingt stressed that he looks well beyond Chanel’s archives for the inspiration of his designs. “When you’re a creator, you’re inspired by everything,” he said. “Sometimes designers say, ‘OK, I need to travel to visit all the museums.’ I’m not sure you’re inspired by that.” “I think you’re inspired by une recontre,” he continued, using the French word for an encounter, “when you meet someone, when you walk in the street.” He drew the initial sketches for Code Coco — a series of 2017 timepieces whose strap and hardware suggest details of a classic Chanel bag — on a plane ride home from New York, where he had admired, through a Fifth Avenue store window, a stylish woman shopping on a brisk winter day.
