In this Boucheron’s new Carte Blanche collection, Impermanence, Claire Choisne seeks to capture the very essence of nature. The collection invites a deeper contemplation of our natural world, so as to better protect it.
Inspired by Japan’s art of flower arranging, ikebana, and its philosophy of wabi-sabi, Boucheron’s Creative Director has dreamed up six botanical compositions, each frozen in its evanescent beauty. From the lightest to the darkest, together they embody how nature is gradually vanishing.
Light is the common thread running through this collection; initially omnipresent, it fades by degrees, dwindling away into a pitch blackness that suggests the end of a natural cycle. These compositions are made up of 28 pieces of true High Jewelry to wear on the body.
To convey the delicate beauty of these two pavé diamond-set plants, the Creative Studio elected to work in borosilicate glass. Boucheron’s artisans fashioned the glass by hand, after mastering the glassmaking skills to draw it out to an extreme fineness of just 2 millimeters. A dragonfly of white gold and diamonds has come to rest in this composition.
Its wings were formed by overlaying sapphire glass onto a film of mother-of-pearl that mimics their natural iridescence. The vase that holds this ecosystem was also hand-fashioned from borosilicate glass. When picked, the eucalyptus becomes a brooch or a piece of hair jewelry; the tulip transforms into a brooch, while the dragonfly is suspended from an ear.
To convey the wild beauty of the thistle, its spiky flower heads were 3D-printed using plant-based resin, a material that hadn’t yet been used in High Jewelry. But this Boucheron innovation presented the artisans with a real challenge: without any metal structure, it would be impossible to set a single diamond into the blooms.
They had to devise a new setting technique, sewing more than 800 diamonds into the thistles’ alveoli by hand. The rhinoceros beetle and the plant’s stems, spikes and leaves were fashioned in white gold and set with diamonds, then coated in a fine layer of white ceramic. The thistle is housed in a vase made from an ivory-white composite material.
When picked, the larger thistle can be worn as a brooch or as a crossbody jewel; the smaller thistle detaches to become a double-finger ring, and the beetle becomes a brooch. Here, the real tour de force lies in the setting of almost 700 rose-cut diamonds into the cyclamen’s white gold petals to form a virtual stained-glass window of diamonds.
The oat stalk is made of black-coated titanium, minutely sculpted into spikelets that are also set with diamonds. Two insects inhabit this ecosystem. One is a caterpillar, crafted in white gold set with diamonds and softly rounded black spinels. Its fine hairs are mimicked by the fibers of a brush similar to those the Creative Studio employs, and an articulated body allows it to arch or flatten.
The second, a butterfly, displays open wings of white gold, encrusted with diamonds and accented by black lacquer. The white gold vase is set entirely with diamonds. The cyclamens have a pivoting mechanism that transforms them into a bracelet or brooch, the oat stalk turns into a hair jewel and the caterpillar is a brooch, while the butterfly sits in the hair.
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