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How Boucheron Turned a Question Mark Into a High Jewelry Icon
In 1879, the legendary French jeweler Frédéric Boucheron designed a necklace without a clasp. Effortlessly slipped around the neck in a single swoop, it formed an asymmetrical curve resembling a question mark. It was a stunning bauble that represented a design revolution—one that, nearly a century and a half later, Boucheron creative director Claire Choisne is updating with the Untamed, an exquisite diamond-set ivy necklace in white gold.
The original piece—officially known as the Point d’Interrogation, or Question Mark—was radical less for its materials than for its mechanics. At a time when women still required assistance fastening heavy, rigid jewelry pieces, Boucheron proposed a fluid, organic design. “He believed that jewelry should follow the body, not the other way around,” Choisne says. His system of fine, almost imperceptible articulations remains intact in her reinterpretation, but Choisne introduces a more tensile line, sharpening the historic silhouette without disturbing its architecture.
She describes her latest high jewelry collection as a portrait of Frédéric Boucheron told through four major pieces. Omitting the Question Mark would have been unthinkable to her. “I could not talk about Boucheron without paying homage to his very first icon,” she says. “I would have loved inventing it.” Her version was also inspired by an 1879 archival sketch that depicted ivy climbing far beyond the collarbone, a piece Boucheron couldn’t fabricate in his time due to its complexity.
Ivy is a telling choice. While many of Boucheron’s contemporaries favored noble blossoms rendered in idealized forms, he was drawn to something more persistent and less polite. Ivy twists, climbs, and asserts itself against whatever surface it meets. In Choisne’s hands, it trails downward in round-cut diamonds and rock crystal fruits, each stem mounted leaf by leaf and calibrated to the millimeter to achieve equilibrium. The Untamed, which required 2,600 hours of work, preserves the audacity of the piece that inspired it—the absence of a clasp, the asymmetry—while “celebrating nature as it is,” as Choisne puts it.
If the 19th-century innovation of the Question Mark lay in freeing women from needing assistance, its 21st-century evolution is about adaptability. The exaggerated length creates a new proportion—instead of sitting neatly at the base of the throat, the ivy descends along the torso, elongating the wearer’s figure. Additionally, sections of the necklace can detach, becoming a collar, a brooch, and a hair ornament. Choisne speaks of her work as something responsive to circumstance. “High jewelry should no longer be viewed as static, but as a true companion in daily life,” she says. A revolutionary approach indeed.
Lead image clockwise from top left: William Morris wallpaper from 1877 with self-portrait as Bacchante, by Angelica Kauffmann, 1780s, GraphicaArtis/Getty Images and Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images; Boucheron’s Untamed necklace, Courtesy of Boucheron; Rita Hayworth, wearing Boucheron’s Col Claudine necklace, with Prince Aly Khan in Paris, 1948, Serge DE SAZO/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; an illustration of blue flowers and ivy leaves, circa 1899, Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images; a sketch of a ballet costume from 1895, Shirley Markham Collection/Heritage Images via Getty Images.
