THE ARTIFACTS OF IMPERMANENCE: BOUCHERON’S MOST PHILOSOPHICAL COLLECTION YET
In an age of instant gratification, in an industry built on the illusion of permanence, Boucheron, under the creative direction of Claire Choisne, is staging a quiet and powerful revolution. While the world races toward automation, Boucheron dares to do the opposite: stop, think, dream, and make by hand.
From the Maison’s Place Vendôme atelier, time is the medium itself. Every piece in Boucheron’s high jewelry collections carries a message: in a world that accelerates, the true luxury is taking your time.
In its latest high jewelry Carte Blanche 2025 collection "Impermanence", six compositions make up the series, each a hybrid of natural forms and technical ingenuity. What looks like a poppy may be composed of matte black titanium petals coated with Vantablack, one of the darkest substances ever created; what seems to be a frozen seed pod might be constructed from borosilicate glass or plant-based resin. This jewelry captures life, embalms it, and fossilizes it in motion. It's the kind of work that could belong as easily in a fortified glass vitrine of the world's largest art museum as it does around a neck.
With each Carte Blanche collection, Claire Choisne assembles a modern-day cabinet of curiosities, where nature, science, and imagination converge in precious form. This time, she has created what we might call speculative archaeology: jewelry as evidence of a dying world. The precision of each construction suggests a jeweler's bench, but also a naturalist's lab. There are echoes of Victorian curiosity cabinets, where insects were pinned under glass, where taxonomies were drawn in ink, and where humans first began to study nature by preserving its death.
These pieces also challenge the notion of luxury as excess. Instead of using rarity as spectacle, Boucheron reframes it as fragility. A glass eucalyptus may cost more than a real one because it has captured what the real one could not: time.
It is tempting to view this collection as a celebration of nature, but that would be too soft a reading. A deeper message unfolds through subtle signs: insects caught mid-movement, petals in the act of curling and fading, the use of Vantablack absorbing light like a black hole. Composition No.6 glows; Composition No.1 disappears. Light to darkness. Beginning to end. Presence to absence.
It is about aesthetics, irresistible elegance, ecological loss, and the human condition itself: our desperate desire to preserve beauty in the face of time.
