The interview: Boucheron’s Claire Choisne on the art of capturing nature’s wild side

Jeweller, designer, artist, and… biophile. Frédéric Boucheron’s legacy lives on as one of the most prolific and talented jewellers of our generation, but he also wore another hat: that of nature enthusiast. In fact, Claire Choisne, creative director of the maison, reveals that he had built up a library of over 600 works, including “the great scientific treatises of the 19th century, so he could study and accurately render the natural world down to its tiniest imperfections”.

She adds, “What fascinated me most when I immersed myself in his nature archives was the abundance of flora and fauna represented, and his true love for nature at its untamed state. We still hold some of these naturalist treatises dating from his time in the private apartment at 26 Place Vendôme.”

Eschewing the design codes of the late 1800s and early 1900s, he drew inspiration from the wild, organic side of nature: for him, wilted flowers, moths and beetles held great fascination, and featured predominantly in his designs.

Nature continues to be a perennial muse for the maison to date. Choisne diligently mines Frédéric Boucheron’s archives for inspiration, transforming age-old techniques, daring materials and ever-evolving ideas into living works of art. From ethereal flower petals made eternal to pieces that mimic the pulse of nature in motion, Boucheron’s creations remain as bold and relevant as ever.

In this conversation with Boulevard, Choisne shares her thoughts on nature as an enduring muse, the power of innovation, and how Boucheron’s high jewellery continues to honour its past while shaping the future.

‘Airelles’ necklace and ‘Roseau’ head jewellery from the Untamed Nature collection. (Image: Boucheron). Top: ‘Plume de Paon’ white gold necklace. (Shot by Kevin Khng).

Boulevard: Why is nature such a perennial muse in high jewellery? What makes it so enduringly captivating?

Claire Choisne: Nature is timeless. It speaks to something universal—a sense of wonder, fragility, and raw beauty that transcends cultures and eras. In high jewellery, where we seek to capture the extraordinary, nature provides infinite inspiration. From the delicate curve of a leaf to the untamed force of the sea, it offers contrasts and harmonies that are endlessly rich and emotionally powerful.

Personally, nature is the theme that inspires me the most, as Frédéric Boucheron who had a vision of a living, naturalistic and untamed nature.

At Boucheron, we believe that the value of reinterpreting archival pieces lies in demonstrating their timelessness while making them witnesses of our times. I think that jewellery, like a work of art, reflects the era to which it belongs. In my high jewellery collections, I often want to put nature at the heart of the matter, showing it to be alive and vibrant. This is of course linked to the current context, where nature is more threatened than ever.

‘Serpent Vintage Bohème’ necklace and double-finger ring. (Shot by Jin Cheng Wong).

Blvd: What possibilities does nature open up for a jewellery artist or designer? What draws you to a particular interpretation?

Choisne: Nature invites freedom. It doesn’t follow rules, and that gives us, as designers, permission to explore, to play with scale, texture, and asymmetry. Nature pushes us to go beyond the ornamental and create something sensorial—realistic pieces that almost breathe, that feel alive on the skin. I’m especially drawn to the untamed and unrefined—nature in its most living and authentic state. There is an infinite poetry in the imperfect, the asymmetrical, the unexpected. When I create, I always look for that feeling of life pulsing through it. I want the piece to carry the soul of what inspired it, not just its shape.

In 2024, we launched new interpretations of our Question Mark necklace icon, inspired by the archives, and that reflect this realistic interpretation. On the Lierre necklace, the artisans worked meticulously to make the ivy as realistic and fluid as possible. They did this through the green hues of the emeralds, the rhodium-plated gold, and especially the ancient ‘en tremblant’ technique—already used in the 19th-century creations—that brought each leaf to come to life with the wearer’s every movement.

Besides, for the Plume de Paon necklace, artisans worked on an articulated system that gave to the various parts of the Plume the ability to move, until each strand was independent and free as a bird. These details, all individually handcrafted, mimic the suppleness and imperfect beauty of a feather.

Left: ‘Plume De Paon’ tiara and ‘Kokochnik’ ring. Right: ‘Noeud Diamants’ ring. (Shot by Jin Cheng Wong).

For the olive-leaf motif necklace, we used different setting techniques to bring the vegetation to life—cut-down, net, pavé, grain and even snow settings—so as to imitate every detail of the leaves in movement. Each being crafted by hand, unaided by any machine, a single leaf demands no fewer than 30 hours of labor. Openwork designs on the leaf backs brought out the shine of the stones and make the overall piece aesthetically lighter. In order to faithfully reproduce the plant’s natural movement, the artisans built three joints into this necklace around the principal branch, so that the piece can delicately adapt the person choosing to wear it. Our ancestral know-how is evidence that we can create pieces that are at once complex, realistic and very easy to wear, in one simple gesture.

Blvd: While nature has always been a central inspiration, how do you keep it feeling fresh and relevant today? How do style, technique or materials evolve to keep up with contemporary tastes and trends?

Choisne: I think today, relevance is about versatility and innovation. At Boucheron, we reinterpret nature through a contemporary lens, using multi-wear designs. Indeed, I like to craft transformable pieces because this modularity speaks to how people wear jewellery today: with freedom, individuality, and a sense of play.

In the Untamed Nature collection, for 28 pieces, we count 116 possibilities of multiwear. For example, the Airelle necklace counts 4 possibilities of multiwear: stems can be detached from the necklace in places to form a separate cascading brooch or smaller brooches. I wanted to show a nature that is invading the body, so we had to think about original multiwear, like plants growing on the shoulder and chest, insects landing on the back, flowers growing out of the hair.

I decided to put humans in the background to let nature take back its rights, wherever it has to. That is why I chose to create original multiwear designs, to symbolically show the vitality of nature, blurring the lines between the human form and its surrounding ecosystem. Nature evolves constantly, and so must we, by echoing its spirit in ever-new ways.

‘Rosier’ multiwear jewellery from the Untamed Collection.

Blvd: At Boucheron, you’ve used real flower petals and black sand in your pieces—what are the creative or technical challenges of working with such ephemeral materials? What excites you about them?

Choisne: My approach to jewellery is poetic and bold. I want it to carry a message, share an emotion, and eternalise the ephemeral. At Boucheron, we think that materials and innovation should always be used for their capacity to express our vision, and not the contrary. This approach is expressed through eternal flower petals in Nature Triomphante collection (2018), a piece plucked from the sky in Contemplation collection (2020), burnt wood in Ailleurs collection (2022), or Icelandic black sand in Or Bleu collection (2024), because nature is by essence ephemeral and therefore precious—I wish to make it eternal.

With the Goutte de Ciel necklace, I wanted to capture what cannot be caught—a piece of sky to wear around your neck. Given such an aim, the creation of this piece was inevitably extremely complex. For two years, we sought a material that could reproduce not only the sky’s infinite palette of blues, but also its fleeting, near-impalpable essence. And then, the jeweller came across a special substance used in space by NASA to gather stardust. This mystery matter—99.8% composed of air and silica—varying in color according to the light is enclosed in a shell of rock crystal set with diamonds. Besides, to achieve the Sable Noir piece, we consulted the automotive and aerospace industries to form engine molds, which consists of binding the sand with a polymeric binder and depositing it in layers 1 mm thick to obtain the desired shape. What excites me the most is to continue pushing back high jewellery boundaries to express my dreams.

Read next:

• Inside Cartier’s by-invite-only Nature Sauvage exhibition in Singapore, unveiling the final chapter of its high jewellery collection
• The rarefied art of crafting high jewellery