In 2018, with the « Fleurs Eternelles » collection, Boucheron combined poetry, nature and technology. This collection seems to have been the first tryal before the « Contemplation » collection, synonymous with poetry, fashion and technology.
The « Fleurs Etenelles » rings are a collaboration with the « petalist » artist Claire Boucl based and based on stabilized flower petals.
You will tell me that combining poetry and technology is inherent in high jewelry collections. However, this collection allows me to share with you special themes : my discovery of aerogel and two very special techniques that are little known and yet used in the filed of jewelry.
So I’m going to focus on 3 necklaces in particular. To see the complete CONTEMPLATION collection you can watch the video here.
This sweet, ligt and poetic collection looks as if it has been created to dream during the confinement. Yet is it obvious that its not the case, jewelry collections require much more time to produce. 3 years explains Claire Choisne, the artistic director.
The Aerogel: A very smart idea
As everyone knows, diamond, is the top material in jewelry and the hardest material on the planet. To combine the Aerogel, the lightest solid on the planet (about 99.8% air) to adorn the flagship piece of this collection and evoke the sky in a jewel of high jewelry is in my opinion a masterstroke. Aerogel has been developed by Steven Kistler in 1931, a bet to replace the liquid inside a gel jar with gas, without it retracting. It has been in the meantime used by the Nasa to capture comet dust. Here we are in the purest poetry associated with technology.
Titanium: probably the metal printing technique.
The lightness of titanium with a zest of mother-of-pearl and diamonds.
It looks like this jewel has been printed directly in metal (probably in several pieces). This technique is used for special projects as to be very precise and print directly the interlaced links. Several industries use 3D metal printing. In jewelry, with precious metals, the machines had to print extremely fine elements and had to allow collecting the leftover metal very precisely as thses metals are very expensive. Below you’ll see a bracelet directly printed on the Precious M080 , one of the printers that avoid using wax printing and then lost wax casting .
A cloud of diamonds on titanium: between fashion and technology
With this piece Boucheron offers you a necklace that could be on a cawalk adorning the mythical little black dress. Fashion brands could have invented it! Moreover, the creation of the necklace needed algorithmic settings that 3D enthusiasts easily recognize in this picture. The software used is Grasshopper a Rhinoceros plugin. Starting from a scanned cotton model,the density, distance and size of the stones have been set in an algorithmic file. The titanium base has probably been printed on the same machine as the previous necklace.
Thus, Claire Choisne’s creativity allows Boucheron, a classic house if any, to propose absolute elegance. This collection is based on a concept of perfect poetry whose simplicity hides a great ingenuity.
In 3 words : Poetry, fashion, technology. Claire Choisne is definitely a discreet, elegant and ingenious designer to follow!