Robert Goossens
Monsieur Bijou, the goldsmith who gave Chanel and Saint Laurent their Byzantine soul.
Few hands shaped twentieth-century costume jewelry as profoundly as Robert Goossens. A trained goldsmith who fell in love with antiquity, he became the secret jeweler behind Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and more, mixing real stones with false and turning rock crystal and gilded bronze into something timeless. Coco Chanel called him her barbaric Byzantine.
The Goldsmith's Apprentice
Robert Goossens was born in Paris in 1927, the son of a bronze foundry worker. At fifteen he began an apprenticeship as a goldsmith, mastering casting, engraving, and embossing, and by seventeen he was making small precious objects for the great Paris houses, snuffboxes for Mellerio, lighters for Cartier. In 1948 he set out on his own, but his heart belonged to jewelry, and above all to the antiquities he studied in the museums of Paris.
Maltese, Byzantine, and Renaissance work shaped his eye. He traveled widely and brought home sapphires, amethysts, rubies, coral, and chalcedony, and after restoring an old cross belonging to Madame Chanel he fell for rock crystal, the clear, inexpensive quartz he was the first to set seriously into costume jewelry. He always preferred to call himself an artisan rather than an artist, believing mastery of the material had to come before imagination.
It is not possible to cover all women in gold. There will never be enough precious metal on the Earth.Robert Goossens
The Maker Behind the Houses
Goossens is the great example of the couture jeweler whose work lives under other names. Most of what he made went out signed Chanel or Saint Laurent, which is why so much of his genius is hidden in plain sight. He came to Chanel around 1953 and 1954, by way of the Maison Degorce, and he and Gabrielle Chanel recognized each other at once. Both loved the Byzantine, both loved to mix the precious with the humble. Together they built the Chanel vocabulary of crosses, lions, suns, stars, and feathers that the house still uses today.
He would make Chanel one-of-a-kind pieces in real gold and genuine stones, which were then copied into costume versions for the collections, so that his private commissions became the very models for Chanel's jewelry. He stayed at her side until her death in 1971, then carried on with Karl Lagerfeld through the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1970s he began his second great partnership, with Yves Saint Laurent and his muse Loulou de la Falaise, a friendship and collaboration that lasted nearly thirty years, until Saint Laurent closed his couture house.
Along the way he made jewels for Balenciaga, Madame Grès, Dior, Givenchy, and Christian Lacroix, and later for a new generation including John Galliano and Alexander McQueen. He also made gilded bronze and rock crystal objects, lions, mirrors, and tables, first for Chanel's own apartment, that count among his most emblematic work.
The Atelier Today
In 2005 Chanel purchased the Goossens workshop, securing the future of one of its most important ateliers. Goossens died in 2016, but the workshop north of Paris continues, where some fifty artisans still handcraft his designs by the old techniques, lost-wax casting, gilding, and crystal setting among them. Under creative director Caroline Gauthier the maison has begun to step into the spotlight under its own name, even as it remains the jeweler that couture houses turn to.
Robert Goossens at MDVII
At MDVII we seek out the work of Goossens, whether signed in his own name or hidden inside the jewelry of the houses he made it for. The crosses, the crystal, the gilded bronze, the Byzantine spirit, all of it bears his hand. The Robert Goossens pieces available now are gathered below.
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