Carat$13,000 for costume, £2,000 for gold: Bonhams runs Chanel in three cities
Bonhams will hold three Chanel sales in September: New York 7 to 17, Paris 14 to 24 with about 400 lots, London 21 September to 1 October. The top jewellery lot is a 1960 Goossens bangle at $13,000 to $20,000.
§1Three cities, one name.
Bonhams has put three Chanel sales on the September calendar across three cities. New York runs Chanel: From the Vault II from 7 to 17 September, with highlights on view at the house's Manhattan flagship from 17 August. Paris follows with Chanel: From the Vault II Paris Edition from 14 to 24 September, carrying roughly 400 lots spanning Karl Lagerfeld's nineties work through Virginie Viard's more recent collections. London closes the sequence with Designer Handbags and Fashion from 21 September to 1 October. Three sales, one house, one name, staged consecutively rather than concurrently.
London is the sale that concerns this desk, because it skews heaviest toward jewellery. It carries a private collection of Chanel costume pieces dating from the 1960s through the 1990s, led by a filigree snake bangle made by Robert Goossens for Chanel Haute Couture around 1960, estimated at $13,000 to $20,000. In the same sale sits a pair of Chanel Fine Jewelry Comète Géode earrings from 2024 in 18-carat white gold and diamonds, estimated at £2,000 to £3,000, or about $2,690 to $4,040. A signed 1960 costume bangle carries roughly five times the estimate of 2024 gold and diamonds.
§2Where the jewellery sits.
The rest of the series is priced as a volume business rather than a trophy one. New York leads with a gold-tone bird cage minaudière from Viard's Métiers d'Art Paris-31 rue Cambon collection, set with simulated turquoise and multicoloured crystals, at $20,000 to $30,000. Paris leads with a white tweed jacket from the autumn/winter 2025 ready-to-wear collection at €2,000 to €3,000, about $2,300 to $3,460, and includes a Lagerfeld-era brooch with rhinestones and turquoise-coloured paste at €700 to €900, roughly $810 to $1,040. Four hundred lots at those levels is a sale designed to clear inventory to a wide bidder base, not to set a record.
A signed 1960 costume bangle carries roughly five times the estimate of 2024 gold and diamonds.
§3Priced as volume, not trophy.
For a paper that has watched the auction calendar thin out through July and August, the value of this is the calendar itself. It is the first substantial house announcement this desk has been able to file in three editions, and it marks the point at which the autumn season starts taking shape. It also fits a pattern this desk recorded at Bonhams earlier in the year, when the house doubled its low estimate on a Piaget sale by leaning on a single named maker rather than on stone weight.
The signature is the material, and Bonhams has priced this series as though it knows that better than most of the trade does. A dealer looking at these three catalogues should read the London estimates twice, because a house is publicly stating that a documented Goossens for Chanel, in base metal and paste, is worth several times a current-production 18-carat and diamond earring from the same maison. That is a provenance market, not a materials market, and it prices attribution, date and documentation rather than carat weight. The practical instruction for anyone buying in September is that the paperwork is the asset, and a piece with an uncertain attribution in this category is not cheap, it is unsaleable.
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