Meet Alma Jodorowsky, Experimental Film Royalty and Chanel’s Latest Muse

Alma Jodorowsky’s exquisitely lush brows and heavy-lidded eyes peg her as the quintessential French It girl, but it’s her heritage that propels her into the stratosphere of fascination. If the surname Jodorowsky rings familiar, it’s because Alma’s grandfather is the legendary experimental filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose visually explosive, surrealist-cum-spaghetti-western films El Topo and The Holy Mountain have been blowing the minds of stoned under­graduates since the 1970s.

Her background makes Jodorowsky an apt face for Chanel’s Spring 2018 Fine Jewellery collection, Camélia. The delicate flower, wrought in white or yellow gold and encrusted with precious diamonds, is meant to embody the desire to break free from preordained rules. Camellias were once used to garnish the button holes of men’s lapels, so their status as the muse for a fine-jewellery collection channels Gabrielle Chanel’s own borrowed-from-the-boys insouciance. Even the language of the campaign—“This is not a flower”—exudes the same cheeky enigma of surrealist René Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe. It’s clear that both Jodorowsky and Camélia share a distinct lineage: one of freedom, irreverence and rebellion.