Latest news with #FrédéricBoucheron
Vogue Singapore
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue Singapore
At Boucheron, to love nature is to love it at its wildest and unruliest
The natural world is a perennial source of inspiration for jewellers. Among the glamorous names of Place Vendôme jewellers, however, Frédéric Boucheron stood apart for a unique perspective: nature that's untamed and almost wild. This is the inspiration behind Untamed Nature, the collection of high jewellery that Boucheron recently presented in Tokyo. In it, creative director Claire Choisne pays homage to the brand's founder and revisits the theme of nature with jewels that creep and crawl across the body. Crafted from a classical palette of white gold and diamonds, these designs reassert the house's unhemmed perspective: pieces named after flowers but which only feature leaves and buds; instead of pretty butterflies, garden creatures like flies and beetles; ivy, thistle and carrot flower plant motifs that look like they've sprouted on the body. Boucheron's Untamed Nature glorifies less-than-pretty plants such as ivy, wild carrot, oats and cattails; and garden creepy crawlies like flies and beetles. Courtesy of Boucheron Vogue Singapore caught up with CEO Hélène Poulit-Duquesne while in Tokyo to discuss this new collection, the allure and challenge of acquiring original Frédéric Boucheron at auction, and how the maison balances classical designs with a more wildly innovative side. Untamed Nature draws a lot of inspiration from Frédéric Boucheron's pieces from the 1880s. What is the innovation that differentiates this new collection from the past? Surprisingly, what is the most innovative technically is finding a solution to go back to the past. Through the years, jewellery ateliers have been moving towards more metal to make pieces safer in terms of quality. But at the time Frédéric wanted no metal, only the stones to be seen. At the time, he wanted nature to be over-realistic, as if you'd picked the flowers. So in this collection Claire decided to push the artisans and say 'you have to come back to the lightness of Frédéric'. Fleur de Carotte (carrotflower) multiwear brooch in white gold with diamonds; and Mouche (fly) and Coccinelle (ladybug) multiwear brooches in white gold with diamonds, mother-of-pearl, rock crystal and black lacquer. Courtesy of Boucheron In this collection, and in your patrimony pieces by Frédéric Boucheron, there is a love of imperfection. Roses aren't fully bloomed, and the maison crafts jewelled bugs and flies. Do clients today still see this beauty of the imperfect? I'm sure they will react nicely because we believe that this is a reality of nature. Claire and myself, we love imperfection. We hide what is totally perfect. But I said to myself very intuitively that we should sell this collection quickly because it's so close to the pieces Frédéric Boucheron was manufacturing. These pieces are difficult to find, they are so rare—you have one or two pieces a year coming to auction. Archival c.1880 Boucheron bodice train jewel with foliage and flower bud motifs. Courtesy of Boucheron It's almost archival. Why are such pieces so unavailable on the auction market? The level of production was lower. I'm following all the auctions because we're trying to buy pieces back. We have one piece here, the tiara with a butterfly, that I had to bid nearly double what I had in mind at the beginning. We have a lot of collectors, which is great because it gives value to the brand and to the work of Frédéric Boucheron. Chardon (thistle) multiwear brooch in white gold with diamonds; Scarabée Rhinocéros (Rhinoceros beetle) ring in white gold with diamonds, mother-of-pearl, rock crystal and black lacquer; and Bourdon (bumblebee) multiwear ring in white gold with diamonds, onyx, mother-of-pearl, rock crystal and black lacquer. Courtesy of Boucheron Is there a specific kind of nature that interests you? Plants from Asia or Europe grow quite differently. Yes, for example, and it's a stupid example, but we are totally obsessed with the bouquets in our boutiques. Because it represents the way we agree on nature, and our vision and identity. It's wild, and it's a lot more about plants than flowers. Nature that you can find in the woods, in the fields and in the countryside. If we don't have the right bouquet we're super upset. Avoine (oats) multiwear head jewels in white gold with diamonds; Lucane (stag beetle) multiwear ring in white gold with diamonds and black lacquer; and Papillon de Nuit (moth) multiwear brooch in white gold with diamonds, mother-of-pearl and black lacquer. Courtesy of Boucheron Boucheron works with unorthodox materials like rattan and aerogel, particularly in the Carte Blanche high jewellery collections in July. Has it ever been an issue explaining these materials to clients who are used to precious gems and metals? We have two types of clients. One is similar to contemporary art buyers and they understand what Claire is trying to communicate. The classical client, who is more on the investment side, wants big stones. We have two collections a year: July is super innovative, and the one in January is more classical. The one we're presenting here in Tokyo is diamonds, diamonds and diamonds. On top of that, these two collections only represent a third of what we sell in high jewellery. The rest is what we call the classics, like Question Mark necklaces and big stones, and they come out of our ateliers every month. How do you put a price on pieces when you're working with unorthodox materials like rattan? On the craziest pieces, we have a low margin. I have a simple example. When we decided to use Cofalit, which is waste, the material didn't cost anything. But the process of making it a material for jewellery took us three years, and in the end, the Cofalit was more expensive than gold to produce and manufacture. If you take the original cost and decide on a margin, then these kinds of pieces would be so expensive that a client could not understand it. So, we lower the margin. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Interview Desmond Lim Words Gordon Ng Vogue Singapore's June 2025 'Gold' issue is available on newsstands and online.
South China Morning Post
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Boucheron's creative director Claire Choisne unveils Impermanence: 6 new multipurpose compositions aligned with the Japanese belief of wabi-sabi and themed around nature's transient beauty
Each year Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne is offered total freedom to push forward ideas of what high jewellery can be with the maison's Carte Blanche collection. Founded in 1858 by the enterprising Frédéric Boucheron, the maison treasures modernity and new perspectives. Its pieces can resemble art objets and are unlike anything you will see elsewhere on Paris' venerable Place Vendôme, where Boucheron remains the oldest jeweller still in operation. Boucheron Carte Blanche Impermanence No 2. Photo: Handout Advertisement Following on from January's Histoire de Style Untamed Nature collection , a nod to Frédéric Boucheron's takes on the natural world – an eternal source of inspiration – the latest chapter, Impermanence, contemplates nature on a more contemplative and more personal level. In six compositions, the collection takes inspiration from the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi in its acceptance of imperfection, and the Japanese art of flower arranging, ikebana, which translates as 'giving life to flowers'. In each, Choisne sought to capture the ephemeral element of nature with one-of-a-kind creations. Boucheron Carte Blanche Impermanence No 6. Photo: Handout 'In this new Carte Blanche collection, I've sought to capture the beauty of nature before it vanishes,' she says. 'These six compositions illustrate nature's fleetingness and fluidity, shifting from light to shadow to highlight how precious it is … the collection is an ode to that fragile instant that I wanted to crystallise for eternity.' Boucheron Carte Blanche Impermanence No 1. Photo: Handout The compositions, each capturing nature's idiosyncrasies – the delicacy of a tulip, the wildness of a thistle or the sense of an oak tree moving in a breeze – fuse ancient and modern techniques, some not previously realised in high jewellery. This traverses the breadth of craftsmanship, from glassmaking to plant-based resin rendered with 3D printing technology.
New York Times
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Boucheron Plays With Bugs
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.'
