One of the 20th century’s most innovative jewelry houses is staging a comeback.
Boivin has been known for its sculptural works, including the ruby-and-amethyst starfish brooch owned by Claudette Colbert and jewels in carved rock crystal or chalcedony created in the 1920s by Suzanne Belperron, who started her career in the atelier founded by Jules-René Boivin and later became a design legend.
The Boivin brand, effectively a Sleeping Beauty since the early 2000s, has bubbled up lately. In May, there was a rare red carpet sighting at the Met Gala, with Kim Kardashian in a floral motif diamond necklace from the 1960s.
And late last year a handful of Boivin pieces featured in A Legacy of Elegance, an auction at Sotheby’s New York. A 1930s brooch made of rock crystal, diamonds and pearls by Ms. Belperron for Boivin sold for $53,340, far exceeding expectations. And the Boivin Grenade brooch, featuring a cushion-cut sapphire surrounded by diamonds and framed by a Modernist gold setting, sold for $279,400, more than four and half times its high estimate.
That surprised even the experts. “Boivin has always been different and differentiating,” said Magali Delagrange Teisseire, the head of jewels and watches at Sotheby’s France. “It was always worn by very strong women who chose their jewels with precision. It’s a little bit fashionista, too, because it was always led by strong creative spirits.”
A Renaissance
Owners of the brand now are betting that Boivin is ripe for renewal.
Since 2019 when his mother, Virginie Torroni, bought the brand and its archives, Thomas Torroni-Levene has sifted through 62 boxes containing more than 25,000 sketches and gouaches (a type of watercolor painting), as well as molds, casts, photos, studio ledgers and correspondence dating to the turn of the 20th century. Eventually, he had furniture custom made to store it all.
As a sixth-generation member of a family of gemstone dealers in Geneva, Mr. Torroni-Levene, now 28, grew up conversant in carats and provenance. As president of Boivin, he now has a chance to play creative director, selecting designs to reproduce or reinterpret for a new audience.
“What we discovered was a real mix, from recent prototypes to molds for high jewelry that was crafted at the highest level,” he said. “Just going through every era and deciding which models to use took us three years.”
He was guided by Olivier Baroin, a jeweler by training and the owner of the vintage jewelry shop La Golconde in Paris. (An expert in identifying rare and vintage jewels, Mr. Baroin, 57, was a co-author of what he described as the first book dedicated to Ms. Belperron’s work, published in 2011.) All reissues or reinterpretations were being made by hand in Paris, the men said.
“It was a little bit like taking a couture dress, turning it inside out and examining all the stitches,” Mr. Baroin said in an interview in his tiny, overstuffed office upstairs at La Golconde. “You have to start by looking at a jewel from the inside and pick up on anything illogical.”
As word of the revival plans filtered out, the two men said that they began receiving commission requests from French and American actresses, a smattering of high fashion designers and film producers.
But restoring Boivin’s luster is a tall order: the 136-year-old brand has changed hands five times in the past 50 years and it has not produced any notable designs in more than three decades.
Breaking with Convention
The house was founded in 1890 by Mr. Boivin, a goldsmith and engraver who initially created naturalistic designs such as articulated garlands in gold and diamonds for Place Vendôme houses, including Boucheron and Mellerio.
Fashion helped make his name, as his wife, Jeanne, was the sister of the noted designer Paul Poiret and the couple were well known in French society.
Mr. Boivin began concentrating on private commissions and, bucking the Art Nouveau trend of the time, he embraced eclectic styles. One of his clips, for example, was inspired by Chinese masks; other pieces had Celtic, Merovingian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian influences. They also incorporated humble materials such as wood and hard stones like lapis lazuli.
But the house came into its own after Mr. Boivin’s death in 1917, as his widow hired women designers including Ms. Belperron, Juliette Moutard and her own daughter Germaine.
“What’s remarkable about Boivin is that it is above all a story about women,” said Mathieu Rousset-Perrier, the jewelry curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
“When you look at René’s era, it’s not classic but it’s not completely revolutionary yet,” he said. “As soon as Jeanne took the reins there was a real aesthetic turning point. Boivin owes its fame to the women who succeeded him. But its real strength as a jeweler is that it produced pieces that were popular for decades, which is rare.”
Introductions
Mr. Torroni-Levene intends to present fresh iterations of some of those designs — alongside many vintage jewels by the Boivin brand and Ms. Belperron — in March at the European Fine Art Foundation fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands.
The pieces are to include the Chaine ring, a 1970s solitaire style, and the Écaille bombé ring set with a 7.67-carat peachy-brown cushion-cut diamond (200,000 euros, or about $234,000).
Mr. Torroni-Levene said the Quatre Corps ring, a multiband style with tiers of bezel-set oval stones, required five prototypes to meet the quality of the 1948 original by Ms. Moutard. Prices for that style start at €40,000.
Also in the works is a re-edition of the Corde cuff designed by Ms. Belperron for Boivin in the mid-1920s. The piece, to be offered in three sizes, is woven from as much as nine meters (almost 30 feet) of twisted silver thread and finished with gold balls at either end (from €26,000).
A favorite among clients regardless of gender, Mr. Baroin said, it is believed to have been inspired by jewels made by the Akha people of Southeast Asia. Today, the design is being reproduced with help from Olivier Galtié, a retired artisan who was the last workshop director for Boivin.
These and other jewels are to have a new home in April when Boivin plans to open its boutique and private salon in a passageway near the Madeleine, the well-known church in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement.
The 85-square-meter (about 915-square-foot) duplex is being decorated in shades of taupe and gray, colors that Jeanne Boivin favored, with textural accents of wood, bronze and velvet. An illustrated book on the house’s history, written by Juliet Weir-de la Rochefoucauld, is scheduled to be published in the fall by ACC Art Books in London.
Mr. Torroni-Levene said that an element of surprise — incorporating unexpected, and more affordable, materials such as rose quartz, lapis lazuli, chrysoprase or chalcedony into pieces — would be part of Boivin’s new story.
“It’s not going to be just about big stones,” he said. “It’s more about focusing on color and form. Mixing materials makes jewels more complex.”
Boivin has always been modern, he added. “What we want to do now is give it a breath of fresh air.”
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