Boucheron is a jeweller that does not care much for conventionality. While this is a statement that many luxury houses would readily claim, few have tangible proof of just how little they care about doing things the usual way—unlike Boucheron, who demonstrates this regularly. Not just with the radical, unorthodox materials that feature prominently within its high jewellery collections, but also in the way that the Parisian Maison chooses to unveil its high jewellery collections annually.
Every January, Boucheron kicks off the year with its Histoire de Style collection, which delves into the brand’s 167‑year archives for ageless designs undertaken with an unmistakably modern eye. Then, it marks the middle of the year with its Carte Blanche collection that, as its name suggests, throws all rules out the window with an extravagant point of view that takes joy in being off the wall.
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That’s not to say that the jewels found within the former are any less noteworthy. As this year’s Histoire de Style collection proves, they are anything but.
Aptly named Untamed Nature, the collection features 28 transformable designs that allow for no less than 116 different ways of wearing them. The Airelles (or lingonberries) necklace, for example, features a system of articulation that lets it bend and mould its diamond‑encrusted form to the body with seamless fluidity while allowing it to be taken apart to form a cascading brooch or several smaller brooches. (The necklace took 3,600 hours to produce.)
Multi‑wearability is a clever feature to have in high jewellery, especially in light of the staggering price tag that accompanies each creation. Yet, practicality was not the only thing on Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne’s mind when she envisioned the pieces as such.
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“I wanted to show nature organically taking over and invading the human body—plants on the shoulder and chest, insects landing on the back, flowers growing out of the hair …” she shares in our interview. “In this collection, plants and insects interact together; each finds its place as [it does] in natural ecosystems. I decided to put humans in the background to let nature take back its rights wherever it has to. That’s why I chose to create original multi‑wear designs, to symbolically show the blurring of lines between the human form and its surrounding ecosystem.”
Choisne’s words of Gaia reclaiming what’s rightfully hers could read like the plot of a sci‑fi dystopia (Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation comes to mind). However, one look at the collection—with its lush, varied forms and lifelike proportions—is enough to convince that the intentions behind the collection are much more nuanced.
As Choisne points out, nature is a popular source of inspiration for jewellers because of the “poetry, freedom, and vitality it exudes”. Even so, brand founder Frédéric Boucheron took a different approach from his contemporaries. Instead of majestic animals and ornate flowers, his fascination was with Earth’s humbler inhabitants—an interest that saw him amass a library of more than 600 works on nature, a number of which were scientific treatises that he meticulously studied so that he could accurately depict them in his creations, imperfections included.
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“Frédéric Boucheron wanted to show [nature] as something stronger [than just] simply decorative; he wanted to embrace its vivacity and its imperfections. At Boucheron, we never sacrifice realism for the benefit of idealisation— we’ve celebrated the beauty of realism since 1858, and my main objective was to bring this vision to life even more strongly,” Choisne shares.
Lierre (or ivy), one of the collection’s most challenging parures to produce, exemplifies this tenet. Here, the plant so beloved by the House’s founder embraces the body with foliage that can be transformed from, among other things, a luscious necklace to a cascading brooch, hair jewels or smaller brooches.
Even more impressive are the vine’s “en tremblant leaves, each equipped with its own trembler at the back that is customised to its exact size and weight so that they tremble as they would in nature with the body’s every move. Another challenge for Boucheron’s master artisans was ensuring that the leaves were perfectly placed so comfort is never sacrificed at the alter of luxuriance, regardless of the form they take.
“For [Untamed Nature], the artisans studied the actual dimensions of plants and insects, then hand‑carved the wax sculptures for optimum precision,” Choisne adds. “As we wanted to represent a nature that is alive and not idealised, we crafted the actual imperfections of the plants—on the Rosier necklace, for example, you can see twisted leaves or an unhatched bud. ”
The Chardon (or thistle) creations required the use of computer‑aided design to produce their prickly contoured leaves, before Boucheron’s artisans carefully placed them on the design to ensure optimal comfort for the wearer. The petals of the Fuchsia earrings were individually crafted to achieve the flower’s natural asymmetry.
The Fleur de Carotte (or wild carrot flower)—the only design that didn’t draw from the brand’s extensive archives—required three different settings and bezels, not to mention a painstaking process of positioning the individual stalks into a cluster to reproduce the wildflower’s fluffy texture.
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Untamed Nature is an exercise on a subject that has been thoroughly explored and revisited, made fresh and invigorating with its earnest sincerity and childlike wonder. Of course, it also helps that the pieces have been masterfully crafted so that they can be styled in fresh, modern ways.
“I want to demonstrate that we can love nature as it is, without idealisation; that what we’re given on Earth is a gift and that beauty can be found everywhere,” Choisne expresses—a beautiful sentiment made manifest through 28 glittering creations that anyone would be wild for.