Magical jewels with a maharaja in mind

From the window of Boucheron’s apartement looking onto the Place Vendôme, I imagine the momentous day in early August 1928 when HH Maharaja Sir Bhupinder Singh of Patiala made his way across the cobblestones. He was en route to make the largest special order in the history of the Paris square.

Accompanied by an entourage of 40 servants in pink turbans (and the 20 favourite dancing girls he had also brought to Paris), his party carried with them six mighty metal chests, filled to the brim with a treasury of gems. The inventory included more than 2,000 carats of emeralds, white, yellow and blue diamonds, and an abundance of natural pearls, sapphires and rubies, all wrapped in diaphanous coloured fabrics. They were being delivered to Louis Boucheron, son of the maison’s founder, Frédéric Boucheron, to set into modern interpretations of Indian jewellery, fusing traditional ceremonial ornament with the prevailing fashionable style of Paris in the 1920s. Boucheron’s designers and workshops took six months to conjure 149 pieces, including a lavish belt, collars, draped necklaces, sautoirs, armbands, head ornaments, turban ornaments and aigrettes. 

The order, as well as the Maharaja’s other commissions – including the Patiala necklace made by Cartier in the 1920s – has become the stuff of legend. And it’s a story being retold through Boucheron’s high-jewellery collection, The New Maharajahs. Creative director Claire Choisne has drawn on the original painted gouache designs for these masterpieces and used them to illustrate the creative exchange between India and Europe that shaped art deco jewellery design.

The Maharaja’s inventory included more than 2,000 carats of emeralds and diamonds

Choisne says she felt the time was right to reimagine the Maharaja’s inimitable and famously extravagant style, given today’s demand for gender-fluid designs and the fact that men are increasingly buying and wearing high jewellery. “It is a story that I’ve had in mind since I joined Boucheron [in 2011], but I wanted to give it a modern point of view,” she says. “Also, I’m not ‘girly’, and this story and the archive designs are made for a powerful man.”

Boucheron has shown high jewellery on both men and women for the past three years. “We were not purposely designing jewellery for men,” explains Choisne. “While the original designs in The New Maharajahs were mainly made to be worn by a man, I wanted to turn the concept around, to make jewels for women that could be borrowed by men.”

The collection is a small but intense edit of only 14 jewels, organised in sets that can be mixed and matched. Choisne chose a mostly all-white palette of diamonds, rock crystal, pearls and mother‑of-pearl, with flashes of emerald to evoke maharaja magnificence. She explains that the monochromatic scheme was a way of contemporising the original designs and simplifying their grandiose, status-symbol extravagance.

The New Maharani suite comprises three theatrical necklaces that are designed – for the brave – to be worn as maximalist layers. First, there’s a lace-like diamond choker that spills over the collar bone. Next comes a five-strand draped diamond necklace, echoing the multi-row pearl and diamond ornaments that typically covered a maharaja’s chest; at the centre of each strand is a single diamond embedded in rock crystal, graduating in size, while the back is made of twisted gold and diamonds to replicate the silk cord that traditionally tied the breastplate necklaces. The third necklace is a midriff-grazing sautoir with a rectangular, fringed pendant.

The lotus flower is a leitmotif in the collection, often created from mother-of-pearl as a nod to the Mughal passion for carved gemstones. It is also the central feature of the New Padma suite rings, juxtaposed with pavé-set diamonds lying under unctuous drops of rock crystal – and intended to be worn by the fistful.

The narrative is completed by two more Indian-inspired creations. The New Churiyans takes the Indian bangle – worn by women of all ages and circumstances across the country – and reimagines it with streams of diamonds. When not in wear, the bangles are stacked on a mother-of-pearl stand constructed to look like a spool of silk. Last, the deeply traditional sarpech, or turban ornament, morphs into a delicate diamond hair brooch, the wispy lines reminiscent of a peacock feather, set with two central rose-cut diamonds. Another echo of the 1920s, with its craze for head ornaments.

Crucially, the jewels are cunningly transformable: the New Maharani sautoir can be taken apart to create a brooch, a shorter necklace or two bracelets; and the luscious geometric diamond and emerald pendant at the centre of the fringed collar of the New Maharajah set may also be detached and worn as a brooch. All of which brings contemporary verve and versatility to a historic jewellery legend. The Maharaja of Patiala, who believed his dynasty was descended from sons of the moon, would surely approve of these heavenly jewels for modern maharajas, today’s queens, princes and potentates of style.