When it comes to high jewellery, Boucheron always roots for the underdog. While other Maisons prize precious stones and diamonds, Boucheron featured seashells, wood and pebbles in its 2022 Ailleurs collection. Some take their inspiration from ferocious big cats and menacing serpents, while Boucheron chooses skeletal crows, toucans and octopi. Do you associate high jewellery with regally imposing parures of precious metal and gems? Try the pop art-inspired oversized, hyper-coloured and ultra-light accessories from 2023’s More is More collection for size. This Parisian jeweller is the contrary Alice in Wonderland of Place Vendôme — always ready to think of 10 impossible things, even before breakfast, and unafraid to find value in places where other Maisons may fear to tread.
It’s this sense of subversive freedom that brings us to the fascinating new Untamed Nature collection. While we might be used to seeing the splendour of roses, majestic swans and dainty daisy flowers in many a nature-inspired high jewellery collection, it’s Boucheron’s penchant for glorifying the mundane, the humble and the easily-overlooked that sees this collection celebrate the magic in the most quotidian of subjects. Kitchen garden shrubs, weeds and even what are traditionally considered to be pest insects are immortalised in precious materials, forming a collection so achingly beautiful yet heart-warmingly familiar that the emotion it provokes is really quite unique.
However, while this focus on leaves rather than flowers and creepy-crawlies instead of more charismatic creatures might seem to be a wholly modern approach, it does, in fact, come from Boucheron’s most treasured history. Because while the Ailleurs and More is More collections came under the umbrella of Carte Blanche — a yearly step into the unknown through creative director Claire Choisne’s wildest flights of fancy — Untamed Nature is classed as Histoire de Style: high jewellery collections that celebrate the Maison’s glorious past.
“For Histoire de Style, my frame is the archives,” Claire tells MOJEH after the collection’s launch during Paris Couture Week. “But within that, I choose what I love — and I love Frédéric Boucheron’s creations surrounding nature, from the very beginning of our patrimony. His pieces were really so beautiful, so that was the starting point.”
Something so striking about Untamed Nature is just how close the pieces are to their original inspiration — the archival pictures that guided Claire’s ideas, all with the striking white gold and diamond jewellery on a plain, velvety-black background, are closely recreated in the new collection, although this time with perhaps a more ambitious sense of scale. “My main goal was to explain the beauty of Frédéric Boucheron’s pieces, and to give a fresh look at their centre. It wasn’t easy — but I love that! I started by trying to understand his point of view when it came to nature — the choices were always quite humble and subtle, always white, and realistic both in terms of movement and volume. You can really feel how he tried to reproduce nature perfectly,” says Claire. “But the name of the collection is Untamed Nature — so we tried to push this idea of freedom and this untamed dimension even more. That’s why you see pieces that take over the body, almost as if they were alive.”
There’s the Claire Choisne that we know and love, her sense of the bold and taste for the uncanny never too far from the surface. However, these slowly creeping and body-enveloping creations also take their cues from jewellery with historic roots, as Claire cites the traine de corsage, a design popular in the 19th century which featured a series of cascading brooches that could be worn in various ways, as the inspiration for a number of the multi-wear pieces.
“It’s really an old way to wear the pieces,” says Claire. “The traine de corsage was articulated, and you could put them on the front of your dress or wear them separately. We chose to do much bigger pieces, and there are systems of brooches everywhere, so you can really play and shape the branches as you want. You can also break the branch down, if you don’t want the full look and you want something easier, and you can also wear it as a necklace. On a lot of the insects we created there are two ways of wearing them, as brooches and as rings.”
Another notable feature of this collection is its monochrome colour scheme. Rendered completely in black and white, just like the images that inspired it, aside from some grey mother of pearl marquetry, rock crystal and black lacquer it’s entirely made from white gold and white diamonds. “It’s the basics of high jewellery,” says Claire. “I wanted to really be able to focus on the details, the movements, the volumes. And to be able to pair every piece with the others. I didn’t want an earring, that matched a ring, that matched a necklace — that’s not nature. Nature is diverse. So the fact that it’s all white diamond and white gold means that we can mix everything, just like in nature.”
And while the mix mostly consists of plants and insects previously found in the Boucheron archives — except for the stunningly intricate Fleur de Carotte, which Claire was inspired to create when plucking the bloom while walking though a field — that’s not to say that their creation was easy. Claire, herself a skilled jeweller, pushed Boucheron’s artisans to the limit to match the level of craftsmanship that was used in Frédéric Boucheron’s original creations.
“They used to use the minimum of metal, just to set the stone, and not one gram more than was necessary,” says Claire. “I told the craftsmen, you have to work just as nicely as Frédéric Boucheron’s craftsmen did — and it was so difficult. They took many more hours than we usually do on these pieces, to obtain that kind of level. In the workshop, there are good days and bad days. But in the end they were really, really happy.”
As we wrap up our conversation about Untamed Nature, Claire is in a sharing mood — revealing her plan for the next Carte Blanche collection which will be unveiled in July: “It’s the first time that I’ve chosen to work on the same theme for both Histoire de Style and the following Carte Blanche,” she grins. “Both will be about nature. There will be a difference, of course, but you’ll definitely see a link. Untamed Nature is more about showing the beauty of Frederic Boucheron’s work, and to show that it’s cool even today. And Carte Blanche will be a little bit more toward my vision of nature — which isn’t so far from Frédéric Boucheron’s — and will make a second chapter.”
And with that fascinating insight into what’s usually the most closely-guarded jewellery drop of the year, it sounds like, at Boucheron, it really is the moment for everything that creeps, crawls and climbs to wend its way out of the shade and into the sunlight — just like Frédéric Boucheron would have wanted.
Originally Published In The March 2025 Issue of MOJEH Magazine. Subscribe here
