Boucheron’s High Jewelry Takes the Form of ‘Untamed Nature’
The jeweler’s latest high jewelry collection looks into the Boucheron archives to create a “living encyclopedia of high jewelry.”
The new high jewelry collection looks back into the brand’s archives to build a “living encyclopedia of high jewelry,” where archival pieces lend inspiration to a fresh perspective of nature.
Claire Choisne, the creative director for Boucheron, created new designs that “show nature asserting itself and taking over the body, blurring the lines between the human form and its surrounding ecosystem.”
There are 28 pieces total, depicting nearly a dozen different plants and several insects that she created to be worn in innovative ways. Many are not just one piece, transforming to become multiple that can be worn separately or as a different type of jewelry.
Throughout the collection, each piece is built in white gold and set with pavé diamonds. Many also include mother-of-pearl, rock crystal, onyx, and black lacquer.
Choisne drew inspiration from Boucheron Founder Frédéric Boucheron, who designed pieces after the ivy that grew on the Palais-Royal—the location of his first store in 1858—along with thistles, ferns, flies, and bumblebees.
He built a library of over 600 works to study and accurately design pieces that render the natural world from his transformable “Thistle” brooch released in 1878 to his “Oat Spikelets” bandeau tiara from 1906.
What set Boucheron apart from other high jewelers was his fascination with a more unassuming class of flora and fauna, rather than noble flowers and majestic animals, explained the brand, which continued to focus on these everyday plants and insects for this collection.
The Untamed Nature collection is a pursuit of naturalistic realism. It portrays wind-swept plants, imperfectly twisted leaves, and wilted flowers.
For the “Airelles” necklace, Choisne depicts a lingonberry plant, a low-growing shrub with red berries.
The stems from the necklace detach to form a separate cascading brooch or a collection of smaller brooches.
The backs of all 84 leaves have openwork crafted into teardrop shapes and each stem features a cut-down setting.
The model in the above picture is styled to show how nature can take over the body. Not only is the Airelles piece growing down his shoulder, but the “Mouche,” which means fly, brooch has landed on his back.
The tiny white gold insect—chosen because the ecosystem cannot live without it—was crafted with rock crystal and mother-of-pearl wings, a diamond pavé body, and highlights of black lacquer.
The “Fleur De Carotte” brooch, which translates to “carrot flower,” showcases the plant’s tiny white flower clusters that are often associated with purity and innocence, said Boucheron.
To create the fluffy appearance of the cluster, three different types of settings and bezels were used.
This is the only piece in this collection that doesn’t draw inspiration from the Boucheron archives, adding the “L. Daucus Carota,” the Latin word for “wild carrot,” to the living encyclopedia of high jewelry.
It can also be worn as a hair jewel.
The “Fuchsia” pendant earrings take the form of the plant of the same name with semi-evergreen foliage and bell-shaped flowers, a symbol of the ardor of the heart.
For this collection, the archival Fuchsia pieces now have pistils emerging from the flowers, swaying as its wearer moves. Hanging at the ends of the pistils are a matched pair of 2-carat, pear-cut diamonds.
Each petal of the bell-shaped flowers was crafted to recreate natural asymmetry, while fresh buds waiting to blossom are displayed adorned in diamonds.
The “Lierre” necklace is modeled after Boucheron’s favorite plant, ivy.
Rather than being seen as a parasitic climbing vine, Boucheron saw how this plant causes no damage to the walls and trees it grows on and transferred that to the body with his jewelry.
For Choisne’s piece, she created a necklace of ivy that can coil up one’s arm to become a bracelet or spread across the chest as a long brooch. Its branches also detach to become hair jewels or smaller brooches.
This piece moves like real ivy in the wind due to the tremblers each leaf is mounted on.
An insect’s role in nature was not forgotten in this collection.
The “Papillon De Nuit” brooch depicts a moth that can become a hair jewel, depending on where it decides to land.
Its wings are made of white and gray mother-of-pearl and engraved to create veining. At the wingtips are black lacquer dots and baguette-cut diamonds.
Crawling up the neck of the model in the above picture is the “Lucane” stage beetle brooch, Europe’s largest beetle.
The insect is covered in pavé-set diamonds, but if you press the diamond-set button under its abdomen and pinch together the beetle’s antenna the mechanism will turn the brooch into a ring.
The necklaces, hair jewels, brooches, rings, pendant earrings, bracelet, and ear clip in the Untamed Nature collection can be viewed on the Boucheron website.
The release of this high jewelry collection follows Boucheron’s expansion to “[deepen] its long-standing ties” to the American market, it said.
The company began by opening its first U.S. location on Madison Ave in New York City in September 2024 and has since opened a second location in the Fontainebleau resort and casino in Las Vegas in December.
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