With the spring months peppered with destination showcases and reveals by Place Vendôme’s marquee names, July’s jewelry landscape could have turned sparse.
But jewelers both established and emerging, much like nature, preferred to fill the space with fresh crops of unique designs, elusive gems and innovative approaches.
Boucheron set the tone with a philosophical musing on archetypes and artificial intelligence, with a collection four years in the making called “Human Being” and part of its annual Carte Blanche series.
Creative director Claire Choisne recalled how she “more often spoke of nature through the vegetal world but not so much of human nature” during a presentation of the five sets in the collection, each comprising a necklace and ring, which led her to consider what a high jewelry necklace looked like in the collective unconscious.
The tool she chose to help her suss out what shape that might take was AI. “An archetype is the median, the average, the general view, which a single brain struggles to do,” she explained. What also amused Choisne was the answer she got: a diamond cluster necklace — a style the designer personally dislikes and admits she’d spent most of her career skirting around.
