"There is no new design, because good lines and shapes are timeless", Elsa Peretti (1940-2021)
One of the stars of the documentary "Halston" (2019) by Frédéric Tcheng is definitely Elsa Peretti, the Italian-born jewellery designer and philanthropist who first joined Halston as a model, becoming his collaborator and then a designer for Tiffany & Co. Peretti passed away last week on March 18 at her home in the Spanish village of Sant Martí Vell, as announced by the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation.
On the web page of the Foundation there is a simple message dedicated to her, that perfectly describes the indomitable Peretti, "woman of extraordinary generosity, philanthorpist, and world-famous designer. A free, strong, courageous visionary. Her legacy will be remembered forever."
Born in Florence in 1940 from a conservative family (her father was Ferdinando Peretti, founder of oil company Anonima Petroli Italiana - API), Peretti studied in Rome and in Switzerland.
She then went to Milan to study interior design and work for the architect Dado Torrigiani. In the early '60s she moved to Barcelona to work there as a model (she also posed for Salvador Dali) and, in 1968, she relocated to New York.
Here she modelled for Halston, Oscar de la Renta and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and, together with Karen Bjornson, Alva Chinn, Pat Cleveland, and Pat Ast, she became one of Halston's favourite models – the Halstonettes – and a lifelong friend.
A regular of Studio 54, Peretti was portrayed in 1975 in an iconic photograph by Helmut Newton (with whom she became romantically involved in the '70s) showing her in a bunny costume by Halston amongst the towering skyscrapers of New York. By then Peretti had already started designing jewellery for Halston.
The first piece she made was inspired by something she had seen at a flea market, but also by the carefree moods in Portofino where she had seen women wearing Pucci walking with a gardenia in their hands. So she created a small sterling silver vase to be worn as a pendant on a leather cord. The vase could contain a flower so that the wearer could take a little bit of nature with them even when walking around the city. The pendant appeared on a Giorgio di Sant'Angelo runway and was just the beginning of Peretti's career in design.
In 1974, helped by Halston, for whom she designed also a globular bottle for his first fragrance, Peretti joined Tiffany & Co. as an independent designer, but by the end of the decade she became the firm's leading designer.
Peretti designed over thirty collections for Tiffany, mainly using silver in her creations characterised by modern and timeles forms, elevating this material. Her inspirations were often drawn from everyday items - a bean, a bone, an apple could be transformed into cufflinks, bracelets, vases or lighters - but she was also inspired by modern art and in particular by Alexander Calder and Henry Moore's sculptures.
She created several iconic and minimalist pieces often inspired by the shapes of flora and fauna, such as her 1973-74 articulated snake necklace (her house in Sant Martí Vell in Catalonia, Spain, that she bought in 1968, proved a great inspiration in later years - her 2007 scorpion necklace was directly inspired by the scorpions she saw there). Her kidney bean, open heart, bottles and mesh designs are well-known around the world.
The mesh was developed in collaboration with Prof. Samuel Beizer at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York; Beizer and Peretti acquired old machines from Whiting and Davis, a Massachusetts-based company that used to make mesh and studied how the mesh was machine-knitted like a stocking. Peretti created with the mesh a series of intriguing pieces, including a scarf necklace and a mesh gold bra and a halter top.
She also came up with the diamonds and pearls "by the yard" concept: pieces with small diamonds pr pearls unevenly spaced along a chain to keep prices low, but also to give women the chance to wear a precious piece without attracting too much attention when out in the streets.
The most famous design she created remains the "Bone Cuff", a fluid piece incorporating organic forms that pay homage to the human body. Available in its small, medium and large version, this piece moved from anatomy as it consisted in a wide metal band with a protuberance that allows the bracelet to fit comfortably over the wrist bone. The piece was inspired by the bones of monks she had seen as a child in a 17th-century church crypt in Rome.
Sarah Jessica Parker wore the cuff as Carrie Bradshaw in the first "Sex and the City" film (2008) and, more recently, Gal Gadot wore an 18-karat gold version in Patty Jenkins' "Wonder Woman 1984" (2020; Jenkins is a Peretti fan).
In 2001, to celebrate Peretti's 25th anniversary with the company, Tiffany & Co. established the Elsa Peretti Professorship in Jewelry Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the first endowed professorship in the history of FIT, in memory of Samuel Beizer.
In 2012 the long-time relationship between Tiffany (that had become the sole licensee for the intellectual property rights of the designer in 1974) and Peretti seemed to come to an end. The contract was instead extended for another 20 years and Peretti retained control of her name, designs, intellectual products and line of products, keeping on producing for Tiffany a wide range of jewelry and interior design and functional pieces including tableware, drinking glasses and leather goods.
This was a clever move for the company considering that Peretti's designs are timeless and always had an important role in Tiffany's net sales (after the new agreement Peretti received a one-time fee plus a basic annual royalty fee for use of Peretti Intellectual Property and 5 percent of net sales of Peretti jewellery).
As the years passed Peretti focused on providing support to cultural, medical, scientific, humanitarian and educational initiatives through her Fondazione Nando ed Elsa Peretti, a charity dedicated to her father, that promotes human and civil rights and initiatives on behalf of unrepresented people and oppressed minorities. Throughout the decades the foundation financed more than 1,000 non-profit projects in more than 80 countries, for a total investment of over EUR 57 million.
In the meantime, her designs became part of the collections in different museums including the British Museum in London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.
The recipient of multiple awards - among the others the Coty American Fashion Critics' Award for Jewelry (1971) and the Rhode Island School of Design President’s Fellow Award (1981), while the Council of Fashion Designers of America named her Accessory Designer of the Year in 1996 - Elsa Peretti was the first non-Catalan person to be awarded in 2013 the National Culture Award by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CoNCA; Peretti acquited entire segments of the village where she lived, restoring and preserving further buildings including the church, and supporting the excavation of Roman ruins and the archiving of the village's history. She also established a working vineyard, which has marketed fine wines under the Eccocivi label since 2008). In 2019 the XII Florence Biennale assigned her the "Leonardo da Vinci" award for a career in design.
Last October the designer celebrated a double anniversary - 50 years since she created the Bone Cuff and 45 years of working with Tiffany. For the occasion limited pieces and a new assortment of bone cuff designs, more affordable than the ones in gold and silver, were also released.
The LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group, owned by Bernard Arnault, bought Tiffany in 2020 for about $15.8 billion, so who knows maybe at some point Peretti's iconic designs may even appear in some of the collections of the fashion houses owned by the LVMH group.
In a retrospective film celebrating the legacy of Elsa Peretti's iconic designs for Tiffany & Co. (shot and premiered in Japan in 1990 and produced by Madoff Productions) in honor of her 15th year designing for the jeweler and her 50th birthday she stated, "For me to be a good designer is the simplest thing in the world. But to be a good human being, that is going to be hard. I'd like to try though. "
Let's hope there will be a film soon about this indomitable spirit who made jewelry for women who could buy the pieces for themselves (rather than being gifted them by men...) and who taught us that pure, minimalist and timeless designs are more important than endless yet mediocre collections based on passing trends.
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