Elsa Peretti ’s HEART AND SOUL: EMOTION AND ETERNITY
Emotion runs like lifeblood through every one of the sensual, lyrical lines of Elsa Peretti’s most iconic jewels. Pure emotion, passionate, heartfelt, humane, concentrated and compressed into simple, spontaneous forms that transform familiar and everyday shapes into powerful symbols and style statements.
When Elsa chose to reinterpret the heart, the universal symbol of love and emotion, it was a sign that she was about to rewrite the stor y of jeweller y design. The heart, the most celebrated of all Peretti designs, asymmetric, amorphous, alive with undulating, organic outlines, was inspired by the void in a Henry Moore sculpture. Elsa recalls the moment she saw the shape, “A void in a Moore sculpture, a big one. No one else saw a heart there. Just me.” Her idea was given extra impetus by the pages of a beautiful, old leather bound book of hear t s , Cuore, given to Els a by her mother, and by the memory of a time when her heart was open, when she felt most free. Elsa’s twist on a defining classic, her sense of freedom gave the shy little heart it s lopsided cur ve; stylised and sculptural, it is at once sweetly innocent and pulsatingly physical, opening yet protecting its inner space. Elsa remembers when the first prototype heart was created she couldn’t work out how to hang the pendant from a chain without spoiling its shape. Mr Kalich, the head of Tiffany’s jeweller y workshop at the time, suggested simply threading the chain through the heart. “I was so overjoyed,” she remembers, “I gave my first model to his fiancée.”
“[ The teardrop is] beautiful in itself and naturally allows a designer a lot of variations: to be elongated, so as to form the clip of a pen, or to curve and close as a key ring.”
The teardrop, simple yet evocative, more joy ful than s ad, is the pure embodiment of emotion. Luscious and voluptuous , heav y with symbolism, it is as Els a describes it , “A symbol of feeling.” Perhaps, a long time ago, she says, although she doesn’t recall too well, she tried to fight sadness by exorcising it, by “wearing the shape of a tear in silver around my neck.” She gave one of the first teardrop pendants to her friend, Liza Minnelli, telling the singer to wear it round her neck so that it would never be in her eye. Yet the drop, teardrop or water drop, is says Elsa, “beautiful in itself and naturally allows a designer a lot of variations : to be elongated, so as to form the clip of a pen, or to cur ve and close as a key ring.” It allowed her to explore the dynamic, organic lines and sensual tactility that are the cornerstones of Peretti design, and to use simplicity of form to highlight the inherent beauty of silver, her
— Elsa Peretti
material of choice. Although she remembers , “T he one I loved most was a tiny rock cr ystal tear – but I lost it.” Playing with the teardrop design, Elsa created an entirely new concept and collection, the Eternal Circle, tapping into one of the earliest amuletic roles of the jewel, and one of the most meaningful of jeweller y symbols , the neverending circle, representing eternit y, tied to the enduring preciousness of the materials that bring it to life. In Elsa’s hands the circle became sof t, three-dimensional and sculptural rather than linear or geometric, dynamic rather than static, cocooning and protective. The Eternal Circle pendant, languorous, emotive, curls like a tiny living creature into a smooth ring, with no beginning or end. Pure Peretti emotion.