What’s truly precious? How about a resource that’s so simple, so obvious, yet so incontrovertibly essential—water. The stuff of life, the majority of what this planet is made of and the element that’s necessary to life. The primacy of water inspired Claire Choisne, the creative director of Boucheron, with her high jewellery this season. It’s one of the Parisian maison’s Carte Blanche collections, the mid-year high jewellery line in which Choisne is given free creative rein.
If Choisne’s past Carte Blanche collections have proven anything, it is that when offered creative carte blanche—hence the name, of course—she takes jewellery design to daring creative extremes. This year’s collection is titled Or Bleu, or blue gold, an ode to the memory of water. More precisely, the raw, powerful and untamed coursing waters of Iceland where she had taken a trip. The creative director looked at water in its natural splendour and translated the impressions of its colours, textures, flows, reflections and transparencies into 26 high jewellery designs, across 14 forms and aspects, that almost encapsulate nature in a frozen state.
The hero piece of the collection is Waterfall, which recreates cascading and coursing water as a diamond necklace. Measuring 148cm—the longest piece that Boucheron has ever made in its history—the white gold and diamond necklace turns the body into a natural feature of rock and stone. A total of 1,816 diamonds of different sizes are set into a single articulated length that can, in the tradition of Boucheron’s multi-wear pieces, be converted into a pair of earrings.
A mind-blowing suite is Givre, or Frost, which captures water in an intermediate state, icy stalactites dripping mid-melt. Composed of a hair jewel, an earring, a shoulder jewel and a ring, these pieces string together pearls, mother-of-pearl and diamonds. Creating this vision called for more than 691 Akoya pearls in a variety of sizes but in the same colour. And in order to imbue the ring with a ‘flowing’ look, it was designed with a ball-bearing mechanism so that its pearl elements hang vertically downwards however the hand is positioned.
In Ondes, or waves, it’s all about the idea of a drop of water that disturbs the balance of a water surface. The physics were simulated on a 3D software to capture the natural ripple motions, which then informed the volumes of a necklace and two rings. Rock crystal is sculpted and polished, turned into thin discs that echo the look of rippling, circular waves.
One challenge, of course, was to minimise the visible metal to maintain the illusion of transparent water. To that end, Boucheron integrated the white gold mountings into the design so that it simulates a sense of shadow and depth to the ‘water’, and fixed the metal underneath the rock crystal. To these are set 4,542 round diamonds in the necklace, with a flush bezel-set diamond set at the epicentre of each wave.
As opposed to clarity and limpidity, one of Choisne’s more dramatic references from Iceland is the inky black sand of its volcanic beaches. This inspired several different designs, which interpret black sand and inky black water. In Eau d’Encre, an incredible feat of obsidian workmanship. The deep, black gem material of obsidian is volcanic glass, a fact that makes manipulating and shaping it very difficult—it could, quite literally, shatter in the process.
In Sable Noire, Boucheron worked with an extraordinarily unusual but not unfamiliar material: sand. The house had previously encapsulated sand in a high jewellery necklace in 2015, but this year it has taken black sand and compacted it with a 3D printing technique more usually found in automotive and aeronautics industrial processes.
Polymer binder is precision sprayed into the sand in fine layers, causing the grains to adhere and take on the desired shapes. This compressed sand forms a hard material with the iridescence of the grains. Boucheron turned this into a triptych of designs: a necklace with bands of pavé-set round and baguette diamonds, a snow-set diamond cuff bracelet where the sand betrays no metal edges, and pendant earrings where the sand has been shaped into briolette drops.
There are a number of designs that celebrate the visual phenomena and appearances water can take. In the Ciel de Glace cuff bracelet, Choisne was inspired by Icelandic ice caves sculpted by elemental forces of wind and time. It’s an incredible piece: a base band of white gold is pavé set with diamonds and a sky blue gradient of sapphires, while the bulk of the piece is actually a single, flawless block of rock crystal that has been carved with undulating textures.
The Iceberg necklace, meanwhile, taps on the house’s long history of designing jewels with rock crystal and diamonds. This spectacular jewel strings together a garland of droplets. Rock crystal is sandblasted to attain the matte, frosted effect; while in the centre droplets diamonds are set underneath clear rock crystal.
The September ‘Kitsch’ issue of Vogue Singapore is now available online or on newsstands.
