It took Boucheron more than 168 years to devote an entire collection to a plant that its founder was already observing on the walls of his early Parisian years. Ivy — climbing, tenacious, free — is not a motif the house chooses by chance today: it is a motif it rediscovers.
The story goes back to the arcades of the Palais Royal, where Frédéric Boucheron opened his first boutique. Ivy grew freely there, and the jeweller quickly made it one of his favourite plants, a source of inspiration found in abundance in the house’s archives — and even on his very first Point d’Interrogation necklace. Where his contemporaries favoured noble flowers and idealised forms, Frédéric Boucheron turned to more discreet and freer expressions of nature, which he sought to capture with remarkable fidelity rather than to idealise.
More than a century and a half later, Claire Choisne, the house’s creative director, extends this heritage with a series of monochrome creations in white gold and diamonds, in which High Jewellery savoir-faire is placed wholly at the service of realism rather than stylisation. It is this new collection, named Lierre de Paris, that Boucheron chose to present at an intimate dinner held on 9 September in the Conservatory Garden of Central Park, in New York, bringing together a small circle of friends of the house in support of the Central Park Conservancy.
The evening itself was intended as a direct tribute to the motif: abundant greenery, tables laid by candlelight to evoke the plant’s vitality, in a setting conceived as a tribute to freedom and resilience — but also to Paris, where ivy continues to grow freely along the city’s façades, wherever it is presented.
The decision to associate this presentation with the Central Park Conservancy is not a mere detail either: by linking the launch of a collection inspired by a climbing plant to the preservation of a New York green space, Boucheron extends, in its own way, Frédéric Boucheron’s gesture of observing nature rather than simply representing it.
Colman Domingo, described as a friend of the house, as well as Paul Anthony Kelly, Leslie Bibb and Lisa Rinna wore creations from the new Lierre de Paris collection for the occasion. Other guests, among them Tonya Lewis Lee, Supriya Ganesh, Ari Fournier, Ashley Avignone, Micaela Erlanger, Camila Coelho, Jack Savoie and Yale Breslin, also wore Boucheron creations. Derek Blasberg, Stellene Volandes, Sarah Ball, Stefano Tonchi and Dora Fung were also among the guests of the evening.
What distinguishes Lierre de Paris from a mere botanical style exercise is precisely this refusal of idealisation, claimed from the outset: where high jewellery most often chooses the rose or the orchid, Boucheron persists, more than 168 years on, in preferring the plant that grows without being cultivated. It remains to be seen whether this fidelity to a motif so modest in its inspiration will go on, like the Point d’Interrogation in its day, to become one of the house’s recognisable signatures.
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