Trompe l’oeil is the art of illusion, the delight of a double take. In jewellery, the challenge of illusion is often to give its hard, fundamental materials—precious metals and stones—layers of softness. For the Parisian maison Boucheron, that was exactly the challenge that its creative director Claire Choisne strove to meet with The Power of Couture, its latest collection of high jewellery.
Inspired by the accoutrements of ceremonial attire, the 24-piece collection casts details such as bows, buttons, collars, epaulettes and aiguillettes as jewellery. “I knew at the beginning that it would be almost a nightmare technically,” says Choisne of transmuting metal and stones into fabric. “But I loved the idea of giving the illusion.”
The relationship between the house and textiles comes directly from its founder Frédéric Boucheron. Unlike many jewellery dynasties, Frédéric’s father was a draper who worked with silks, laces and other delicate fabrics. That legacy made itself apparent in many of his designs and creations—pieces that Choisne encountered repeatedly when delving into the Boucheron archives for research. “I imagine there is a link between Frédéric Boucheron being the son of a draper and the quantity of pieces around the theme of couture. There are plenty,” she says.
Some of the historical pieces from the late 1800s that ended up on Choisne’s moodboard for this collection include a gold meshwork ribbon necklace with dangling pearls at the ends, a frilly bow necklace studded with diamonds, and even an ornament designed to be worn on the shoulder like a cap sleeve. “This is crazy. I think he was the only one to do this kind of way to wear jewellery,” says Choisne of the radical wearability that Boucheron pioneered more than a century ago.
But the past is just a starting point. “To be totally honest, some of the pieces were a little bit baroque for my tastes. Not pure enough. I don’t want to just recopy the archives. I wanted to make a reinterpretation with even more modernity, as something powerful,” she adds.
Choisne’s point of difference is a purity of line. Designing a bow, she admits, scared her at first. “Because for me, a bow is cheesy and a little bit too girly. Even the one that we have in the archive—it’s super nice high jewellery, the realisation is perfect. But for me the design is not from today, you know. Too girly and not pure enough.”
This set the tone for the disciplined palette of materials and colours that Choisne would design this collection with: white gold, white diamonds, and rock crystal cut, carved and sandblasted to great effect.
The first design that came to the designer was the Tricot necklace, which is an illusion of knitting with rock crystal. “Of course, everybody knows that it’s not possible,” she concedes.
But the astounding elegance of the work encourages a leap of imagination. Rock crystal is carved into beads, sandblasted to give it a frosted texture akin to cord, strung together on nitinol cables (a super elastic and flexible alloy of nickel and titanium that’s used in medicine), punctuated with diamond links, and finished with a large button set with diamonds and rock crystal.
The final look is of a fourragere, a braided cord detail found on military dress uniforms, that has coiled itself around the neck as a five-strand choker.
Another trick of the eye that defines this collection: grosgrain ribbons fashioned from rock crystals. The Bow necklace—Choisne’s cleaner, fuss-free interpretation of the unavoidable motif—features the most work on this illusion. A total of 435 individual frosted and baguette-cut rock crystals are fitted into white gold frames, the stripes of their joints and the matte texture coming together to emulate the fine horizontal weave of grosgrain.
“It was quite complicated,” Choisne admits of this manipulation of rock crystal, a signature material for Boucheron since the house pioneered its use with diamonds.
“But I love challenges. I’m a jeweller myself and I studied how to produce the pieces, so I’m quite obsessed with the technique. In the archives, there was not such complicated work. There was rock crystal but used in a simpler way. So I tried to find the limit of what we can do with this material. And honestly, I haven’t found the limit yet.”
There’s one area, too, where Choisne continues to test the limits of jewellery design: how and where on the body you wear the pieces. Her reasons for it are two-fold. “It forces me to think differently. If you think more about the human body, it gives you new ideas. It pushes me to think about style,” she explains. “Usually, traditionally, when you design a collection you will do a succession of pieces.” She affects a robotic voice: “I will do five necklaces, three bracelets, et cetera. Too classical.”
The other reason, she adds, is to “offer a lot of possibilities to the client so the piece will be worn as much as possible”. The idea is that if you introduce a host of novel ways to wear jewellery as mutable parts of an outfit, there’s less chance of them gathering dust in a safe.
That Bow, for example, can be worn six different ways. Fully assembled as a necklace, detached from its neck panels as a brooch, further detached from the draped ribbons as a brooch, bracelet or shoulder ornament, and with its centrepiece stone detached as a solitaire ring. “We try to have at least one way of wearing them with a styling twist,” says Choisne of the approach.
It’s a line of thought that threads itself back to a historic closeness between haute couture and haute joaillerie. An event in May last year gave Choisne firsthand experience.
When the writer, critic and professor Antoine Compagnon was inducted into the Académie Française, a council founded in 1635 that’s the authority on matters of the French language, he turned to Balenciaga Couture to create his vestments, and to Boucheron’s high jewellery atelier for his ceremonial sword. Choisne designed a ceremonial épée made entirely of glass for Compagnon (“Fully transparent. Quite difficult to produce.”) and attended his induction ceremony. “It was magical to see all those people in ceremonial attire,” she says. “I love that. It gives you a power, I think, when you’re in those kinds of attire.”
The March 2024 ‘Dualism’ issue of Vogue Singapore is available for sale online.
