by Cherie Burns
If I had ever doubted it, a scene from a fine arts fair in New York’s Armory on Park Avenue made me a believer. I watched a man whom I supposed to be a dealer take a gold Boivin ring from its case and give it a sniff. I asked him what he was doing. “You can smell who owned it,” he explained haughtily as he threw a glance at me as though I’d asked about his sex life. I didn’t ask him who it smelled like. It was probably unromantic of me to think it would most likely carry the scent of hand cream from whoever had tried it on before him. But this was not the last time I would be told that jewelry carries history in its scent.
Chapter Five
In the early 1900s, Paris was the cultural capital of the world. It set fashions in dress, art, and pleasure for no greater reason than that there was suddenly a wealthy class of people who paid no taxes and didn’t really work. Their world was one of great excesses, frivolity, cultivated taste, luxury, and relaxed morals. The city had emerged from the Franco-Prussian War with a great burst of construction and beautiful architecture. Other European cities at the time, notes historian and writer Roger Shattuck, were former villages that expanded out beyond a few grand palaces at the center. Paris was a great world stage for theater, both at the real Opéra and on the street, in the salons of its citizens and the public cafés. Fashion influenced every quarter of life in a world that went out to see and be seen from almost noon until midnight.
Boivin’s timing for entering the jewelry business was fortuitous. The appetite for fine jewelry was growing rapidly. In the early twentieth century in Paris, a man’s economic ascent was often measured by the jewels that his wife wore.1 Some women became famous simply because of their jewels, whether they were countesses, courtesans, or merely society beauties. Empress Josephine had an endless craving for jewels and finery. Queen Alexandra of England and the Grand Duchess Wladimir of Russia, known for their ostentation, appeared totally encrusted when they stepped out in public. Countess Greffulhe of France became a symbol of international elegance by spending huge sums on her jewelry and wardrobe at a time when fortunes were not yet eroded by taxation.
It was the French, of course, who made jewelry design into an art rather than a craft, as it had begun. The Belle Epoque, between 1890 and 1914, drew to a close with the start of World War I, but its influence on design stretched far into the twentieth century. The creative arts in Paris were then, postwar, fueled by new European and American millionaires. From the time of Napoleon III, France had consistently pursued a policy of supporting and promoting luxury goods, designed to extend France’s influence and promote Paris as the European capital of good taste. Russian grand dukes considered Paris to be their second capital of luxury and joined in the pleasures.
During the Belle Epoque, in which the avant-garde became prominent in France, fashion influenced every domain of life. The traditions and reserve of the nineteenth century were left behind in a kind of swagger that affected style, literature, morals, and society. The Eiffel Tower was built in this era, fashion magazines were first published, scientists, painters, and writers all tilted toward the future. Salons and banquets symbolized the moment. Impressionism spread throughout the art world. Ravel, Debussy, and Satie revolutionized contemporary music. D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce were making their reputations for modernizing literature while living and writing in Paris. Shattuck called it “a lusty banquet of the arts.”
* * *
The new moneyed class’s appetite for quality and decorative novelty converged to make designers of all kinds of adornment, if not exactly rich, at least prosperous. Wealthy Americans, especially those with the newly minted riches of the robber barons with their oilfields and railroad fortunes, had by the twenties joined the craze for extravagant and beautiful things. Jewelry was no longer, as it had been for Catherine the Great, a perk of royalty. She had used her stash to reward friends for loyalty and to finance armies. These newer rich were accumulating their own fine jewelry. Small creations to adorn a bodice or dangle from an earlobe were the intimate embodiment of the trend. They were riches you could hold in your hand, show off, and keep close.
* * *
It was just as the city was blossoming that René Boivin became a jewelry designer. Born into a modest family of goldsmiths in 1864, he wanted to become a doctor, but his family’s financial struggles required him to enter the family business as soon as he graduated from high school at seventeen and work as a goldsmith with his elder brother. He took drawing lessons and showed a talent for making jewelry, especially engraving, and then he learned the respected craft of jewelry making by training with Parisian craftsmen in the world of decorative arts. Determinedly, he attended various workshops to learn the trade, and by the time he was twenty-five he was recognized as a master, known for his draftsmanship. It was a good time to achieve that designation, since the era of the master jeweler had just begun, and those who earned the title, like Fabergé and Lalique, were elevated to a class above once anonymous tradesmen. Their professional and social status was closer to that of an artist, perhaps more like that of celebrated architects today, who have the genius to present a concept that others will produce to specification.
* * *
René Boivin increased his chances for success when he married Jeanne Poiret, the sister of the rising dress designer Paul Poiret. The two made a potent combination. As designers they rubbed shoulders with the intellectuals and trendsetters of their day. The Boivin jewelry salon functioned as a gathering place for Erik Satie, Sigmund Freud, and other well-known personages in Paris who befriended its owners, René and Jeanne. It became a salon of sorts, where people appeared as much for the elevated company as the jewelry. But Boivin was establishing a tradition as well of true craft and design genius.2
* * *
For those of us who see jewelry only when it is for sale in a well-lit display case or while watching a jeweler hunched over his table making repairs to a watch or bracelet clasp, its origin is a mystery. The intricacies of making fine jewelry are both a surprisingly exotic art and a flat-footed trade at once. It was even more so in Paris in the late 1800s when Boivin began. A jeweler, understanding the properties of the metals and stones available to him, would draw a design, then the actual making of the piece would be turned over to a workshop that specialized in fine metalwork. Many jewelers had their own workshop on the premises, but if it could not keep up with demand, or the design required specialized skills beyond those available in-house, the work was farmed out to others. Some workshops excelled at engraving, others at stone setting, yet others at the mechanics of movable parts. It was important for a good jeweler to have relationships with the workshops whose skills could help realize his designs. Unlike today, when lasers and technology make it possible to industrialize and mass-produce jewelry, in the early twentieth century it was an art that was practiced by skilled artisans, the “golden hands” who labored to make every piece as perfect as possible. Most were paid by the piece, not by the hour. Keeping man-hours to a minimum was not a critical part of the process, which is perhaps a reason that the jewelry from this period rose to such high standards of quality. The designer and fabricator in the workshop were partners in the pursuit of perfection in gold and gemstones rather than high efficiency for a mass market. It was not unusual for a design to pass through another half-dozen hands of specialists at each stage of production before a finished piece of jewelry emerged in the showroom.
* * *
René Boivin and his wife started modestly, as did most jewelry craftsmen at the time. They lived in an apartment facing their workshop at 38 Rue de Turbigo. While Boivin designed, Jeanne kept the books and oversaw the accounts. Boivin was making a reputation for his engraving; the Paris department store Le Bon Marché and jewelers like Clerc and Boucheron carried his designs. A bestiary of imaginative and sometimes mythological creatures, especially cats, was popular. Griffons, peacocks, and chimeras turned up in his designs. Though he designed clocks, vases, and candelabra, it was a turn toward graceful naturalism
that distinguished his work. An avid gardener, he loved flowers and subscribed to botany magazines for inspiration. His brooches of flower sprays and blossoms caught on with a public that wanted floral naturalism in jeweled necklaces and a variety of pins for bodices and dresses. He excelled at creating delicate blossoms out of gold and diamonds, usually daisies or wild roses, but his range included thistles, irises, lilies, and even orchids. His flowers were encrusted with diamonds. Their delicate mountings enabled them to tremble with any movement, a trait the French called en tremblant. It was a trend in the pieces created at Boivin that would mature over the years and point toward the starfish to come.3
Art Nouveau had taken Paris by storm in 1900 after the World’s Fair, visited by 30 million people. The star of this design world was René Lalique, a designer in glass and jewelry whose contributions to Art Nouveau thrust jewelry into the public consciousness as a major art form. The public was hungry for novelty to accompany its symbols of wealth and prestige. Yet while the importance of jewelry in French fashion soared, René Boivin was not swept away by Art Nouveau trends. If he gave a nod to the Nouveau style it was that he incorporated more flat jewelry and fewer of the tremblant-type projections onto his pieces as time went on. The designs were simpler, the settings heavier. Design seemed to triumph over delicacy. When he began working with semiprecious stones, he moved in the direction that would distinguish Boivin jewelry later, up into the thirties and forties. Topazes, tourmalines, amethysts, even moonstones began turning up in jewelry designs that had emphasized diamonds a decade earlier. He used wood inlaid with pearls, and his creation of large raised signet rings, a natural for an engraver, sparked a lasting trend in women’s rings. Never content to stand still, he expanded into exotica and designed jewelry with a Persian flavor. He created pendants with pavé-set stones on platinum or black-enameled gold. Connoisseurs of quality and luxury goods were his clients. The House of Boivin boasted clients from the Middle East and South America as well as the commissions of a sophisticated and demanding clientele in Paris that was willing to pay high prices. Persistent and energetic in his pursuit of beautiful objects, Boivin also collected antiques and exhibition pieces. He was partial to boxes, flasks, cases, aigrettes, all things with special appeal to an engraver.
The Boivin salon now occupied space at the tonier Rue des Pyramides address. René and Jeanne, who had three children, moved into a wonderful and spacious apartment on the Boulevard Haussman in 1907. The next decade was a prosperous and influential period for his wife Jeanne and her brother, Paul, by then Paris’s leading couturier. Children of a textile merchant, Paul Poiret and his sister, Jeanne Boivin, had risen to the top levels of Parisian design and fashion society. Poiret designed clothes to satisfy a trend that had taken Paris by storm after the opening of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of Sheherazade in 1910. He quickly ascended into the Paris fashion elite and became the most sought-after couturier of his time with collections of bold and theatrical styles.4 Opulent costumes in hues of emerald green, vermilion, orange, and carmine worn to depict life in a sultan’s harem electrified the public and sparked the advent of a vivid Orientalism in fashion circles.5 The well-publicized archaeological discovery of royal tombs and their cache of treasures by two British explorers in Thebes, Egypt, added a shot of pharaonic inspiration to the appetite for new exotic styles. Poiret added Turkish trousers and loose-flowing styles to his creations, occasionally topping a turban with an aigrette or other piece of jewelry. A jewelry clientele that had somewhat conservatively preferred diamonds suddenly fell in love with lush stones and colors. Boivin began designing bold, colorful jewelry for Poiret’s collections and soon fashion icons such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Diana Vreeland, as well as artists and intellectuals, trooped to the Boivin salon. Poiret declared that he would rather stage lavish parties than spend money on advertising, and the ploy worked admirably well for Jeanne and René, who partied hard along with him as photographs of the pair in an array of elaborate costumes, almost comic by standards today, illustrate. The alchemy of fun and fashion was powerful and attracted artists and intelligentsia to the spirit of their jewelry.6
Poiret often brought his celebrity clientele to his sister’s apartment where, if they had not already discovered the gracious Boivins and René’s work, they were introduced to the perfect accessories for their dresses and gowns. Their imposing size, bold proportions, and brightly colored jewels were perfect for Poiret’s creations. It was an ideal convergence of fraternal marketing. So gracious and fashionable were the Boivin salons that clients and friends dropped by to simply hang out. Not only did the Boivins have the salon, that fashionable room where jewelry was designed and sold, but they also presided over their salon, that uniquely French social tradition of hosting an assemblage of notable and fashionable persons for conversation and conviviality. The salon was no longer open to “passing trade” but by appointment only. Life was good. But it was about to change.
* * *
Boivin went to war to defend France in World War I and, like more than a million other Frenchmen to die in service to their country, he never returned. Ironically, rather than ending the story of Boivin, his death set the stage for a second chapter that would distinguish the House of Boivin perhaps even more than his design legacy.
Jeanne Boivin lost both her husband and their son Pierre in the war. The public expected her to shutter and close the business, but she had been running the accounting and operations side of the jewelry house for her husband for years, and she had relationships with the workshops and craftsmen that accounted for the high quality of Boivin pieces, so she quietly continued fulfilling orders and became the first woman in Paris to run a major jewelry house. Jewelry in the 1920s was considered a man’s business and there was prejudice against her, but demand continued for the consistently beautiful and well-designed pieces Boivin produced. So long as she kept up the standards of the work, no one truly cared what gender she was. She would in time leave her own distinctive mark on the jewelry business.
* * *
The war brought an end to the new relaxed frivolity in fashion and jewelry. Precious metals became scarce, especially platinum, which was essential in the armament industry. The British government outlawed trading it. And as fashion often does in wartime, the jewelry business contracted. Fine pieces were sold or stashed away for security, like savings. The leading French jeweler Cartier produced diamond brooches and pendants using the symbols of war such as cannons and fighter airplanes to capture the spirit of the public. Not much feminine fun and expression there. It would be the 1920s before style was reinvigorated.
Jewelry was reintroduced into women’s fashion with a vengeance in the 1920s. Even scantily clad flappers and free spirits loved to cover themselves in glittering jewels and bling. Sautoirs, long necklaces with tassels or ornaments at the ends, were gayly tossed down the bare backs of daringly low-cut dresses. Fashion-conscious women wore multiple bracelets on bare arms and bandeaux, sometimes punctuated with a brooch, across their foreheads at night. “Jewels became an accessory, strictly dependent on the shape and color of the dress on which they were worn, rather than a precious ornament to represent a display of wealth as had been the case in the prewar years,” explained David Bennett and Daniela Mascetti in their book Understanding Jewellery. Floral-spray brooches of the nineteenth century, even corsage ornaments, weren’t suited to the loosely fitted, freely moving fashions of the twenties. Some women, striving for perfection, went so far as to have clothes designed to match a piece of jewelry. Clothing and jewelry were even more inextricably bound together, and new creative freedom began to creep back into style.
* * *
The brooch itself had evolved through history, from the Bronze Age, and was born of functional need. Broochlike pins and fasteners held primitive garments closed. In the eighteenth century they were adopted by men to adorn their hats, just that little extra personalized splash that distinguished a man’s style, like the small feathers that were tucked
into hatbands in the 1950s. Women adopted brooches called devant-de-corsages in the early 1900s. They were sewn directly into the dresses, which typically featured a fitted bodice and therefore did not need a pin to secure them. They were permanent fixtures. When bodices went out of fashion, so did corsage ornaments, leaving a vacuum that came to be filled by the brooch. It could be a focal point of a solid-color dress, a feminine touch on a tailored suit, even a little fillip on a handbag or in one’s hair. It could be worn imaginatively on various dresses. It was versatile—and showy.
Jeanne Boivin’s relationships with the workshops where her jewelry was actually manufactured greatly contributed to her rising eminence. She dutifully maintained those relationships after the death of her husband. At the height of Boivin’s popularity and success in the thirties and forties, when orders from Boivin kept a half-dozen workshops busy for months at a time, she had her own workmaster and lapidary in the workroom behind her salon, but she often outsourced work to specialists. With confidence, she and her designers strained the bounds of imagination to make jewelry that had not been seen before.
* * *
In the 1930s and 1940s, when Paris and the jewelry business were booming, the “statement brooch” became fashionable, especially since it could be pinned to the structured bodices of the new classic tailored suits and fitted dresses. Flowers perished, but a diamond orchid or lily stayed fresh. Ironically, the stock market crash of 1929 did not make women more restrained about their jewelry, the way hard times are often accompanied by relaxed hemlines. To the contrary, those women with money to buy jewelry opted for bigger, chunkier bracelets and designs, almost like power jewelry today. The trend reflected a phenomenon in entertainment, especially the movies, during lean times. The public, and fashion, preferred symbols of wealth and luxury as a kind of escapism. It was evidence that buying and wearing jewelry was—and is—an outward expression of fantasy.
