There is a particular pleasure in turning something on. The click of a lighter. A key in an ignition. A lamp flooding a dark room. A tap released and water rushing against porcelain. Small gestures that divide one moment from the next: before and after, stillness and movement, anticipation and action.
The CHANEL PREMIÈRE belongs to this world of activation.
When it appeared in 1987, the PREMIÈRE was the first watch created by CHANEL. By then, the House had already spent decades altering the rituals through which women moved through the world. Gabrielle Chanel had changed the way they dressed, replacing restriction with ease; changed the way they carried a handbag, slinging a chain over the shoulder and leaving the hands free; even changed the way they wore fragrance, with N°5 becoming something approaching an invisible signature. Time was another territory waiting to be claimed.
Designed by Jacques Helleu, then artistic director of CHANEL, the PREMIÈRE did not attempt to mimic the established codes of traditional watchmaking. Nor was it a masculine watch made smaller for a woman’s wrist. It began somewhere more instinctive: with the language of CHANEL itself.
Its geometry came from an object already intimately associated with the House. The octagonal form of the PREMIÈRE echoes the stopper of the N°5 fragrance bottle, itself said to recall the aerial geometry of Paris’s Place Vendôme. Around the wrist, a chain interlaced with leather borrowed another familiar gesture from CHANEL’s handbags. Black lacquer met gold. Two hands moved across a dial stripped of numerals, indices, a date window or even a seconds hand.
There is something wonderfully provocative about that absence. A watch, after all, is supposed to tell you the time. The PREMIÈRE gives you only as much information as you need. Perhaps that is because precision was never really the point.
CHANEL describes the absence of hour markers on the PREMIÈRE as an expression of simplicity and a “spirit of freedom”. It is a tiny act of refusal built into the dial. There is no second hand insistently accounting for what has just passed, no numbers instructing the eye where to land. Time is present, but it isn’t allowed to dominate.
Instead, the PREMIÈRE proposed time as something experienced through the body. Its chain slips over skin like jewellery. Its black face catches the eye like lacquer. Its proportions make it as natural beside a cuff, a bracelet or a sleeve as they do alone. It doesn’t ask its wearer to organise herself around time; it allows time to become part of the way she dresses.
Gabrielle Chanel’s great disruption was rarely decoration for decoration’s sake. Her codes so often began with the body: jersey that moved differently, trousers borrowed from menswear. The PREMIÈRE inherited that instinct. Even its most recognisable details are tactile ones – leather threaded through metal, chain moving against skin, a clasp fastened around the wrist. You don’t simply look at it. You put it into motion.
Nearly four decades later, that original silhouette remains remarkably intact. In 2022, CHANEL returned explicitly to Helleu’s first design with the PREMIÈRE ÉDITION ORIGINALE, preserving its octagonal black dial and leather-woven chain rather than attempting to modernise away the qualities that made it distinctive. Around it, the PREMIÈRE universe has expanded and mutated: stretched into sautoirs, wrapped repeatedly around the wrist, rendered in precious materials and transformed through high jewellery and haute horlogerie.
Each iteration changes the sensation without disturbing the central idea.
The PREMIÈRE GALON, for instance, exchanges the familiar chain for a sculptural bracelet inspired by the braided trim that traces the edges of CHANEL jackets. The PREMIÈRE SOUND extends its chain into a sautoir and, unexpectedly, a pair of wired earphones. Elsewhere, cuffs, ribbons and double-row chains alter the relationship between watch and body. Across them all, the small octagonal face persists: recognisable, almost talismanic, still ticking.
Maybe this is what makes the PREMIÈRE feel particularly right now. We have never had more ways of knowing the exact time. It follows us from phones to laptops, dashboards to ovens, glowing relentlessly from every available screen. Wearing a watch no longer needs to be an act of utility. It can return to something more sensual.
A choice. A ritual. A gesture.
Fasten the clasp. Turn the key. Strike the flame. Flick the switch.
The circuit closes.
Experience the Let Taste Live issue in its entirety this September, available on newsstands from Monday 7 September 2026, and through our online shop. Find a stockist near you.
PHOTOGRAPHY Annika Kafcaloudis
FASHION Hannah Cooper
TALENT Claudia Stiertzel @ Meraki Models
NAILS Tulin Coban
STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Koby Dulac-Daley
Feature image (left): CHANEL PREMIÈRE Galon watch; CHANEL COCO CRUSH ring. Feature image (right): CHANEL PREMIÈRE Iconic Chain watch; CHANEL COCO CRUSH ring.
