Honorine was founded in 2008 by Fanny Boucher, a French jewellery designer living in India. Made of vividly coloured semi-precious stones, her pieces tell tales of poetry, travel, and a longing for all things beautiful.
Fanny has been living in Jaipur since 2005. She visited the Pink City for the first time during a backpacking trip after her education in Paris. "Jaipur got under my skin straight away", she says. Back in Paris, she ran into a jeweller who offered her a job in Jaipur. She packed her bags and moved to Rajasthan.
For three years, Fanny chose stones and ran orders, overseeing the entire manufacturing process. Following goldsmiths around the city and sitting on the floor, sketching with local craftsmen, she learnt the trade.
In 2008, she went solo and started making her own jewellery. Obsessed with colors, she cites India as a vital source of inspiration: "Everyday in the street I see extraordinary colour combinations casually worn by village women: electric blue and poppy red, light green and fuschia, cream and indigo. I want my jewellery to reflect this wonderful rainbow."
Proportions, her other passion, is something she says hails from her love of art and literature. "I am very much French at heart, but the longer I live in India, the more I realize how both cultures, so different in appearance, work beautifully together. From India I love the bold colours, the old jewellery techniques, and of course the fabulous imagery, but my obsession for harmony and proportions clearly comes from my more classical, European background."
Living in the capital of gemstones, she quickly gathered an appreciative private clientele. "Friends started asking me to make a piece for them, then friends of friends, then when friends of friends who owned stores started buying too, I set up my own company."
She named her brand after her great aunt Honorine, whose tales of wit and boldness Fanny grew up with. "It's a name that evokes so much for me, from childhood stories to Honore de Balzac and old school France, I like everything about it."
Although she says she is a real country girl, being born and brought up in the wuthering hills of Lorraine, she feels strangely at home in the colorful chaos of India."We did travel a lot as kids and I remember crazy night trips to the souk in Marrakech when I was 10. I bargained so hard, the shopkeepers begged my father to take me away."
The East, already, was calling.
