Nature inspirations in jewellery might be as revolutionary as, well, florals for spring. All manner of flora and fauna, from the pretty to the savage, have been mined in the jeweller’s art for centuries. So it was with some scepticism that I went in July to the Chaumet headquarters on Place Vendôme in Paris to view the maison’s latest line of high jewellery, titled A Journey Through Nature.
In an elegant salon, I sat with the brand’s CEO Charles Leung to discuss A Journey Through Nature and the house’s recent naturalist slant—the second instalment in a trilogy devoted to this theme. “Empress Joséphine was fascinated by nature,” he began, invoking Chaumet’s most famous historical client, who has become its contemporary muse and leading light.
“She had a particular interest in botanical beauties she brought to France because she was not born here. She was born in Martinique, in the Caribbean.” The empress, he told me, built a greenhouse with exotic species in her Malmaison castle estate. Her tastes invariably informed the jewels that Marie-Étienne Nitot, founder of Chaumet and personal jeweller to the empress, would craft.
When I asked Leung about the ‘naturalist’ description of Chaumet’s perspective, he waved breezily for me to look behind at a pair of framed paintings on the wall. At a distance, they look like matched watercolours of flowers. With a squint, though, I realised that the one on the left was a botanical study, and the picture on the right was a jewellery gouache. “It’s using jewellery techniques, stones and metals, to recreate nature,” he explained of this deceptively simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get trick of the eye. “It’s actually an act of courage and a bit of a show-off because it’s very difficult to do so nicely,” he added.
To wit, Chaumet’s new 46-piece collection is structured as a triptych of botanicals. The twist, however, is that it is not organised by genus. Instead, design director Olga Corsini conceived A Journey Through Nature through senses and flavours. A first chapter on freshness and lightness, a second on sugar and spice, and a third on rich aromatic warmth. Plants as they might taste and feel, not simply seen.
“For the past 200 years, we’ve looked for the most beautiful flowers,” Leung explained. “This time, we would like to challenge ourselves to find a common language in nature that’s beyond the first degree.”
Hence a verdant emerald and diamond parure, designed with flowing lines that evoke tiered fields, waterfalls, and the pour of water on fragrant tea leaves. Or a mesh-style necklace dotted with yellow, green, blue and pink pastel-hue Madagascar and Ceylon sapphires that summon the dreamy zestiness of crushed verbena from Grasse.
Or, perhaps most sensorially evident, the Coffee Aroma necklace with a tassel of glittering diamond beans, a 12.09-carat Madagascar sapphire at its heart, and a diamond ribbon whorl to represent the familiar sillage and diffusion of a freshly brewed pot. A story not so much about grand exotics and rare species; rather, elevating familiar botanicals and common sensorial experiences.
This sort of sensation, Leung said, expresses what “nature can put into our imagination”. Not merely the plant sitting pretty in, say, a garden, but harvested, felt in our hands, tasted on our tongues and smelled in the air. Corsini and the Chaumet design studio’s decision to home in on sensation rather than visual literalism also gave them some creative leeway.
In the Mint Leaf parure, for instance, the jewels do not recreate the appearance of its eponymous plant. Instead, Chaumet extrapolated the refreshing sensation of biting down on mint and connected it to the cooling pleasures of a summer’s pool plunge. Thus a suite of jewels set with emerald-cut aquamarines chosen to recall swimming pools, and Akoya pearls that create the sense of a splash. “This,” said Leung, “is the power of these beautiful ingredients that nature so kindly gives to us, that transport us to different places.”
The September 2026 ‘Beyond The New’ edition of Vogue Singapore is available online and on newsstands.
