Reposted from The New York Times
PARIS — A hush fell over the room just before the arrival of the maharaja of Jodhpur, Gaj Singh II, a man whom many affectionately refer to as Baapshi — father, in his native Rajasthan. He entered with a subtle smile to his coterie, wearing a gray Nehru jacket with ruby- and emerald-encrusted buttons, his salt-and-pepper hair and paintbrush mustache neatly combed.
Polite greetings — “Good evening, your Highness” — were murmured with a touch of reverence as the maharaja inspected the room’s installation: Bleu de Jodhpur, this year’s haute jewelry collection from Boucheron. It was born of a collaboration between the maharaja and the house’s creative director, Claire Choisne.
Ms. Choisne, in a leopard print Gucci dress and hovering around six feet tall in her customary spike heels, swooped in behind the maharaja and playfully squeezed his shoulder as she mugged for the cameras, her face incandescent, his, amused. “He is so friendly,” Ms. Choisne said later, “that you forget what his position means.”
The two first met a year and a half before, during Ms. Choisne’s visit to the maharaja’s “Blue City” of Jodhpur, a place that enchanted her with its indigo-washed, cube-shaped houses, its colossal Mehrangarh Fort — a 15th- century sandstone citadel that sits high above Jodhpur on a desert cliff — and the Indo-Art Deco splendor of the Jazz Age Umaid Bhawan Palace, where the maharaja lives and received the designer.
“We shared the same desire to create a modern collection with a modern vision of Jodhpur,” Ms. Choisne recalled.
Gaj Singh II, the maharaja of Jodhpur, and Claire Choisne, Boucheron creative director, worked on the jewelry house’s collection, Bleu de Jodhpur.
The Jodhpur necklace, which took 1,700 hours to fabricate, has Makrana marble with diamond drops on one side and, on the reverse, a classic Indian floral motif in sapphires that seems to float on rock crystal.
A view of the Place Vendôme from the Boucheron headquarters in Paris.
The Ricochet necklace was made of rock crystal and diamonds set in white gold.
Boucheron’s ties to India are of long standing. A drawing of a necklace the house created for the maharaja of Patiala, right.
Ms. Choisne always uses rock crystal in her haute jewelry collections but, for Bleu de Jodhpur, she added other unusual elements. For instance, the rock crystal pendant in the Nagaur necklace is filled with sand from the Thar desert, near Jodhpur.
Makrana marble was cut very thinly to create the Plume de Paon watch.
Makrana marble also was used in the Fleur de Lotus necklace, set with sapphires, diamonds and rubellites.
Boucheron staff members handling the Jodhpur reversible necklace.
The large diamond and white gold Mehndi brooch, which can also be worn as a necklace, mimics the henna art used to decorate brides in an Indian wedding ceremony.
The maharaja — who is no stranger to jewelry: “I’ve seen some nice stones growing up” — said they discussed jewelry ideas and the rich culture of his region. “I organized for Claire to see things to get the feel of Jodhpur; one of the Sufi festivals with the dervishes, and the festival of colors,” he said. “She saw the palace and the blue houses of the old city, she saw so many things.”
“She didn’t know what hit her!” he added with a laugh.
The maharaja said Ms. Choisne wanted to use materials that had a physical connection to Jodhpur, so he prodded her to order veinless, milky Makrana marble from the local quarries that supplied the builders of the Taj Mahal in 1631.
The result, the Plume de Paon necklace, was the first use of marble in haute jewelry and, Ms. Choisne said, the collection’s greatest technical challenge. “The Plume de Paon necklace is a paradox,” she said. “It’s a feather, a feather is light, but it’s made of marble and marble is hard, marble is heavy, but cut so thin, it becomes light.” The necklace sells for more than 1 million euros, as do many of the largest of the 100 designs in the Bleu de Jodhpur collection. Prices start at €50,000.
The Nagaur necklace also used an unexpected material: sand from the Thar desert that surrounds the medieval Mehrangarh Fort, captured in a transparent rock crystal pendant shaped to echo the fort’s geometry.
“Claire brings a flat design up here to us, and we make the composition feasible, no matter what it is,” said one of the goldsmiths in the upstairs atelier, where 13 artisans create Boucheron’s haute jewelry. “We make it wearable, comfortable, we give it volume, we make it real.”
When Ms. Choisne, then 35, was appointed creative director at Boucheron in September 2011, she had only a week’s time to invent a collection for the house’s return to the Biennale des Antiquaires, the pre-eminent event in hautejoaillerie. Was it intimidating?
Having spent a decade as studio manager for Lorenz Bäumer, where she produced collections for many of the Place Vendôme jewelry brands, she was, in her words, “entreiné” — in shape — ready to create quickly and confidently.
“Now I have one brand to focus on, I have all of the archives, I have the pleasure to work directly with the craftsmen,” the Paris-born designer said, clapping her hands together and grinning.
Boucheron, in business since 1858, is one of the last jewelers on the Place Vendôme to have an in-house atelier. It was also the first to set up shop there, in 1893, a few years after Frédéric Boucheron invented his groundbreaking “question mark” necklace — an open, asymmetrical collar, now incorporated into many of Ms. Choisne’s designs, including the Plume de Paon.
Her approach, “the rebirth of the archives” as she calls it, revisits many early Boucheron concepts — like the rock crystal she uses in every haute jewelry collection. “This material gives you a lot of creative freedom to play with the transparency,” she said.
She pulled out the design for the reversible Jodhpur necklace, a majestic plastron that took 1,700 hours to fabricate, with linear Makrana marble and diamond drops on one side and on the opposite, a classic Indian floral motif in sapphires that seems to float on rock crystal.
Placing the design side by side with the archive illustration of the traditional Indian necklace that inspired it, Ms. Choisne explained, “You can see the plastron shape, the tassel and the cord. I kept these from the past, added marble and made it reversible.”
The inspiration necklace is one among 149 designs that Boucheron created for the maharaja of Patiala in 1928. “That order is legendary at Place Vendôme,” according to Vincent Meylan, author of “Boucheron: The Secret Archives.” “He was very famous because he was two meters tall, he was obscenely wealthy and he was crazy about sex and precious stones,” Mr. Meylan continued. “One day, he arrived at Boucheron from the Ritz with all these caskets of stones” — an astonishing 566 carats of diamonds and 7,800 carats of emeralds — “and ordered them all turned into jewelry for himself. Back then, the biggest jewelry was worn by the men.”
Ms. Choisne said, “I always wanted to do something with the Patiala designs.
“And then in Jodhpur,” she continued, “I met the maharaja, and I had such a traditional image in my head, but he was so modern.”
Born in 1948, a year after kingdoms were relinquished for India’s independence, the maharaja, now 67, has positioned himself as a modernizing force in Jodhpur.
“When I came home from university in my 20s, whatever remaining privileges we had were taken away by the government,” the maharaja said, referring to the 1971 abolition of the titles, lands and state salaries of princely India. “I felt the need to stay connected, with the people, with the culture, with one’s history, with one’s own land.”
He has since revolutionized the role of a maharaja, casting himself as a cultural ambassador for Jodhpur and an activist in the preservation of the region’s cultural treasures. He transformed his Umaid Bhawan Palace into a luxury hotel to attract tourism and turned the Mehrangarh Fort into a museum and research center.
He created a host of festivals, including the Sufi festival that Ms. Choisne visited. Recently, he organized an international exhibition of 18th- and 19th-century paintings from Jodhpur, which inspired Ms. Choisne to create a “Garden and Cosmos” chapter for Boucheron’s collection, featuring the Fleur de Lotus necklace with a stylized sapphire, rubellite, diamond and marble flower springing from the tip of the pioneering question mark collar.
“When you look at the first pieces of Frédéric Boucheron, he developed such creative techniques, like the question mark necklace,” Ms. Choisne said. “So we have to keep the spirit, we have to create emotion.”
Over the few July days in which the Bleu de Jodhpur collection was viewed, “Ooh!” and “Très jolie!” was the chorus as visitors glimpsed the jewels for the first time.
But the greatest compliment came from the man involved in their creation. “They really understood my city,” said the maharaja, who, after viewing the collection, ascended the stairs to thank each of the atelier’s artisans personally.
This article was first published in The New York Times
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