The Rugged Topography of Iceland Inspired Boucheron’s Latest High-Jewelry Collection
This fall saw the opening of the first Boucheron boutique in the United States, at 747 Madison Avenue, in New York City. The 166-year-old maison feted the occasion with an event for their latest high-jewelry collection, Or Bleu, with names like Gwyneth Paltrow and Colman Domingo on the guest list. But the name on insider’s lips—if you really wanted to kiss the right Quatre ring—was that of Boucheron creative director, Claire Choisne.
Choisne has been in the role since 2011, and in that time has overseen creations as technically marvelous as they are beautiful, drawing on a range of diverse influences (for instance, a documentary about the Franco-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot), but always coming back to the supreme elegance of the natural world. The pieces in Boucheron’s Or Bleu collection are a perfect example of this, not so much designed by Choisne as they were divined from the raw, otherworldly topography of Iceland. “I wanted to show the power of water,” Choisne says. “But also to highlight how important it is to protect it; to show its fragility, as well.”
Her time among the Nordic country’s frosty floes inspired a pair of pendant earrings in grand antique marble and paved with diamonds that required more than 100 hours of craftsmanship. Other pieces in the collection make use of new technologies, like a collar 3D-printed in black sand, or an almost five-foot-long necklace in white gold and diamonds, the longest ever made by the maison’s ateliers, designed in part with the computer software Blender. “But I never start with the technique,” says Choisne. “Technique is a tool. What I start with is a dream—a story I want to tell. Technique is how I achieve the dream.”
Back in New York, the Madison Avenue boutique features an emerald cut facade rendered in glass and metal, a nod to the maison’s logo and the shape of Paris’s Place Vendôme, as seen from above. Upon entry, guests are greeted by a wall of straw marquetry, the work of French artist Olga Thune-Larsen; a custom wallpaper, composed to archival Boucheron campaigns, was created especially for the space by Atelier d’Offard. It’s a fitting home for the heritage, craft, and imagination that are hallmarks of Boucheron, and the first of many to come: Openings in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami are slated for the coming months, bringing Choisne’s love for nature to a city near you.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of ELLE DECOR. SUBSCRIBE
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