Place Vendôme Featured in New Boucheron Campaign
● The “Icons” campaign, starring models Anja Rubik and Ludwig Wilsdorff, goes live on Tuesday.
For Boucheron, its new “Icons” brand campaign, which will be revealed on Tuesday, was an opportunity to go big — and home.
The campaign, which centers around new oversize twists on its “Quatre” collection launched in 2004 and three other house signatures, captures models Anja Rubik and Ludwig Wilsdorff on Place Vendôme, the historic birthplace of the French jeweler.
“Why shoot in the Bahamas when we have the most beautiful place in the world just outside our home and that it is where we originate from, since Frédéric Boucheron was the first to settle here,” quipped chief executive officer Hélène Poulit-Duquesne.
Creative director Claire Choisne felt that adding these XXL versions transcribed the house's “cutting-edge, lively, authentic vision of jewelry and high jewelry” that magnified their features, such as the geometric repetitions of the Quatre line or the tear-drop motif of Serpent Bohème.
Blowing up their proportions was a way to avoid jewelry campaign tropes of either having ambassadors that overpower too-delicate designs or using still-life shots of jewels alone, by putting jewelry and models on an equal footing, explained Poulit-Duquesne.
She was also adamant the campaign “wasn't so much about being unisex as it was about individuality,” said PoulitDuquesne, lauding the strong characters of the co-stars.
Rubik was the ideal woman to front the campaign because she embodies “a much more bold, much more empowered” take on femininity, especially given the seasoned model's support for environmental causes and advocacy for sexuality education in her native Poland, according to Poulit-Duquesne.
For Poulit-Duquesne, an image of the supermodel wearing a shirtless tuxedo and one of the house's question-mark necklaces in Cannes 2019 reinforced this idea of Rubik as “someone who could be a client, who is a client.”
Adding a male ambassador was “an intuitive choice” that “came naturally,” especially “given that the Quatre ring has been worn by men and women and that this collection in its entirety is fundamentally unisex, having male and female faces” in similar postures with the same designs was evident,” she added.
German-born Wilsdorff, who previously appeared in high jewelry collection images, is the first male model to star in a brand campaign for the Kering-owned jeweler. “He is spontaneous, radiant… the embodiment of the Boucheron man,” Poulit-Duquesne said.
It was “clearly the mirror of what we are trying to say through our jewelry,” said the executive, who previously told WWD she hoped seeing male celebrities wearing jewelry on red carpets would “switch men onto the idea that they're allowed to wear jewelry.”
Shot by British photographer and styled by arch-Parisian Emmanuelle Alt, the six visuals and four videos of the “Icons” campaign featuring Rubik and Wilsdorff will appear on the brand's platforms, through media placements and billboards.
Another shoot, this time featuring ambassadors Zhou Dongyu and Lu Han, is scheduled to be shot in China.