Boucheron Plays With Bugs

New York Times

26-01-2025

Creepy crawlies never looked so good.
In its latest high jewelry outing, titled Untamed Nature, Boucheron has focused on an approach to reinterpreting flora and fauna that began with its founder, Frédéric Boucheron — and the result is strikingly true to life.
The 28-piece collection is part of Histoire de Style, a continuing series inspired by Boucheron's archives that the brand presents annually during the Paris haute couture shows in January. Having previously chosen such themes as couture and a reinterpretation of a pair of diamond and aquamarine brooches owned by Queen Elizabeth II, Boucheron's creative director, Claire Choisne, said her dream this time was to 'erase jewelry entirely.'
'I wanted to move away from grandeur and get down to nature in its most humble aspects,' Ms. Choisne said. Working solely with white gold and white diamonds, as Boucheron himself did in the late 19th century, she expanded the house's symbolic herbarium with designs of perennials, weeds, spikelets and reeds, all botanical metaphors for qualities such as love, loyalty, abundance and resilience.
Other high jewelry presentations this season have similar themes. Bamboo, an emblem of flexibility, renewal and longevity, was chosen as the name of Chaumet's new collection, to be unveiled in the brand's gilded salons on Place Vendôme this week.
And as part of the third installment of Cartier's Nature Sauvage collection, to be presented at the Ritz Paris, the house is showcasing jewels that Zoe Saldaña wore this month when she won the best supporting actress award at the Golden Globes for 'Emilia Pérez.' Called Melis, the Greek word for honey, a parure of earrings and a necklace reprises the house's honeycomb motif; the necklace is set with a honeybee whose body is a briolette-cut 2.64-carat fancy intense yellow diamond.
(Other presentations, however, have taken different paths. Dior's new collection focuses on lace-and-floral themes, while the geometry of 18th-century French gardens inspired Elie Top's Les Liaisons Dangereuses collection, celebrating the 10th anniversary of his brand, presented at Christie's Paris.)
At Boucheron, pieces inspired by late 19th- and early 20th-century archival designs were revisited to lifelike scale and made using a combination of traditional techniques and new technology to heighten the impression of realism.
They include a prickly thistle-leaf necklace and brooch, a hair jewel shaped like a sprig of oat grass and an intricately articulated lingonberry body jewel that can be worn as a necklace or, more daringly, over the shoulder. Some of the jewel's branches also can be detached and worn as brooches.
Reprising the house's iconic question mark necklace, invented in 1879, a rose bush — minus the blooms — features three pavé leaves and is anchored by a pear-cut diamond weighing slightly more than six carats, surrounded by baguette and round diamonds. The primary gem can be detached and mounted into a ring, and replaced on the necklace with another droplet in rock crystal and diamonds. A large brooch-slash-hair jewel shaped like a carrot flower, also called Queen Anne's lace, is the sole piece not based on archival references.
But Ms. Choisne really seemed to let loose with bugs, which she has rendered true to nature, and also larger than life.
Already part of Boucheron's repertoire — the actor Andrew Scott wore a trio of bees from 1948 to the 2024 Met Gala — the new bumblebee is a larger-than-life version with stripes of diamonds and onyx, and translucent wings carved from mother-of-pearl and overlaid by laser-engraved rock crystal edged in black lacquer. On its belly, a runner mechanism makes it possible to transform the piece from a brooch into a two-finger ring.
In the same vein, a simple mechanism allows an imposing rhinoceros beetle with lifelike wings that can move to be changed from a brooch to a two-finger ring that spans all four fingers. And with a pinch of its mandibles, a stag beetle fully pavéd in diamonds morphs from a brooch to an imposing knuckle duster.
There is also a trio of winged creatures — a honeybee ear clip, a housefly brooch and a ladybug with spread wings — on offer as a set.
It is the unpretentious moth, however, that looks the most realistic. A body composed of baguette diamonds is flanked by four wings carved from mother-of-pearl, with hand-engraved veining, black lacquer accents and diamond edging.
Describing its velvety finish, Ms. Choisne said, 'It's always a question of how to take the archives and go even further.'