One sunny weekday afternoon in Paris, French jewelry designer Charlotte Chesnais arrives at the Left Bank café Le Rouquet on Boulevard Saint-Germain. Fresh from Salone in Milan, where she unveiled her stylish 24-piece flatware collection for the French silverware brand Christofle, she’s dressed in a buttery leather Gucci jacket and white jeans, her short hair pulled into a ponytail. With her petite frame and impish grin, she’s girlish at 40 years old.
“My dream was always to make cutlery,” she says of the project with the historic house, which falls under the umbrella of Charlotte Chesnais Studio. It was three years in the making and will be available starting this month. “I have never worked on something for that long—thankfully, I’m still happy with it,” she says with a laugh.
Chesnais joins a stable of legendary artists and designers including Gio Ponti and Andrée Putman, as well as Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, who have collaborated with Christofle. It’s a natural partnership, given her experience with metalwork and the fact that her jewelry is often compared to object design. Wearable, sculptural forms that interact with the body—such as the Biseau ring, which loops around two fingers almost like a cuff, and the Bond bracelet, which wraps around both the wrist and thumb—appear to exist beyond the realm of jewelry, though they fit like second nature.
Le Rouquet, a favorite haunt of Chesnais’, sits opposite one of her Parisian boutiques (she has two, both designed by Dutch architect Anne Holtrop). She used to frequent the legendary Left Bank address of Café de Flore, just steps away, before it was taken over by Emily in Paris fanatics. “Ce n’est pas possible,” she says, using that perfect French phrase, of the circus down the road. “So I come here, and although they are not very nice, I like the interior design.”
Just as for those devotees of Darren Star’s much derided but wildly popular T.V. show, Paris once held a mythical allure for a young Chesnais. One of three children, she grew up in the small historic city of Sillé-le-Guillaume, near Le Mans, a few hours southwest of Paris. Even as a young child, she eagerly awaited her trips to the capital. “I was desperate to be in Paris and be like the Parisians,” she says.
A diligent student, at 17 she enrolled in an academic preparatory school. After a few months, however, she did an unexpected about-turn and enrolled instead at Studio Berçot, a now-defunct private fashion college in the 10th arrondissement. The school had prestigious alumni including Martine Sitbon, Isabel Marant, Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski, and Camille Bidault-Waddington. And now, Chesnais.
Initially, she was no fashion acolyte: “In the very beginning, I was very intimidated. I had a complex about not being a Parisian and not having the right bags; I didn’t know what Comme des Garçons was,” she says of being plunged into the world of fashion. “But the school helped me sharpen my taste and point of view.”
She found her footing when she landed an internship with Vincent Darré, the then-artistic director of Emanuel Ungaro. Now a well-known, somewhat outré interior designer, Darré had assisted Karl Lagerfeld for six years before joining the French fashion house. “He is a total character, a dandy,” Chesnais says of Darré. Being in his orbit was an education; it opened doors. When she applied for a position at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, she believes Darré’s name was likely the clincher.
That was 2005, peak Balenciaga, and Chesnais rose through the ranks, starting as a junior ready-to-wear designer and eventually working on special projects, including fittings for V.I.P.s (she once fitted Salma Hayek’s wedding dress in Venice), jewelry, and the archival line, Les Éditions. For Balenciaga’s Fall/Winter 2009 season, she designed a debut collection of sculptural bicolor cuffs inspired by Loulou de la Falaise’s designs at Yves Saint Laurent.
“It was such a creative time. I was working with artisans all over Europe, and I wasn’t given a road map of how it should be done, or a budget. No one even asked if it could be produced,” she says of the free and experimental approach that has influenced her own collections.
When Ghesquière moved to Louis Vuitton, Chesnais admits she was devastated. But the transition proved pivotal. A position opened at Dior Jewelry, under Raf Simons, and she spent a summer putting together a proposal. She didn’t secure that role, nor did she obtain a similar position she interviewed for at Hermès, but what she did have was around 40 sketches for a jewelry collection, including sculptural styles like her Saturn earrings, which established her signature aesthetic: a mix of bicolor metals (unique for that time) and circular forms.
In 2015, she launched her brand while she was pregnant with her first son. Clearly impressed with her brand debut, Dior called her back a year later for that position. She accepted work as a consultant for a period.
Both the brand and her eldest hit one decade this year. “It’s been 10 incredible years. It has been challenging at times but also an immense source of learning in so many ways. The quality of the work, the adventures, the people I’ve met—it’s all been incredibly rich and rewarding. I honestly didn’t expect any of it; none of this was planned,” reflects Chesnais.
Today, she juggles three young boys at home while leading a team of 30 at work, though she remains the sole designer. Her husband, Tanguy Rouget, who has a background in finance, joined the company as general manager in 2020. She recounts how his support and involvement have fostered a shift in the business. “Before he arrived, I hadn’t asked any of those long-term questions in the first five years of the business, and that had allowed me to be very creative. But since then, he has helped me to focus on strategy,” she says. This has included a shift toward retail: First the two Paris boutiques, and then, this summer, she opened her first boutique outside of France, a three-story space in the Aoyama neighborhood of Tokyo (her most significant market outside of Europe).
Work inevitably comes home with the couple, but they’ve created boundaries to prioritize family time. They carve out an hour together in the evenings to play games. Monopoly is a family favorite, and the boys are being taught to play Buraco, a rummy-style card game popular in Italy that the couple often plays with friends. “We are obsessed,” says Chesnais, who vowed from the outset of her business that family would always come first. “I decided that because it’s my company and it has my name on it, I’m also going to give my rhythm,” she says. “And today my rhythm is very linked to my family.”