Elsa Peretti, model and jewelry designer, dies

Elsa Peretti, a fashion model in the 1960s and 1970s who became more renowned as a designer of jewelry, including her “bone cuff” bracelet — one of the most recognizable accessories of the past 50 years — died March 18 at her home in the Spanish village of Sant Martí Vell. She was 80.

Her death was announced in a joint statement from her company and the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation. She died of natural causes.

When Peretti moved to Barcelona to become a model in the mid-1960s, her wealthy Italian family cut off financial support. She became part of an artistic enclave that included surrealist artist Salvador Dalí before moving to New York in 1968.

“I arrived with a black eye, from my lover, who didn’t want me to go,” she later recalled to Vanity Fair.

With her tall, elegant appearance, she became a favorite model of designers, including Issey Miyake, Charles James and especially Halston, who went by just one name.

“Elsa was different from the other models,” Halston once said. “The others were clothes racks - you’d make them up, fix their hair, and then they’d put their blue jeans back on. But Elsa had style: She made the dress she was modeling her own.”

While working as a model in New York, Peretti began to design accessory items, including belts and a tiny silver bud vase worn as pendant on a chain or leather strap. (The vase was functional and could hold a small flower.)

Inspired in part by Halston’s minimalist style, she became a designer for Tiffany & Co. in 1974. She also designed a perfume bottle for Halston, with a rounded teardrop shape.

Peretti and Halston became close friends and were often seen together at New York discotheques in the 1970s, including Studio 54. During those years, Peretti admitted to subsisting on little more than caviar, cocaine, vodka and cigarettes. She was fluent in English, Italian, Spanish and French and often mixed all four during a conversation.

Strong-willed and tempestuous, she had a fiery temper that she sometimes turned on Halston, despite their close relationship. He had given her a sable coat for designing the perfume bottle, but after an especially heated argument, she threw the coat in a fireplace, where it was immediately consumed by flames. They reconciled before Halston’s death in 1990.

By then, Peretti was already celebrated for her jewelry designs. Instead of gold, she turned to silver as her primary metal, preferring its stark clarity and relative affordability. She often based her ideas on simple shapes found in nature, such as beans, scorpions and snakes.

Peretti traveled the world to find skilled jewelry makers and held each item in her hand, testing its contours and heft, as if it were a living thing. One of her earliest designs was a necklace shaped exactly like a kidney bean but made in silver or gold. She later incorporated the bean design into countless other items, from cuff links to purses.

She designed earrings shaped like teardrops and used finely woven gold and silver mesh to create a feathery metallic scarf that could be draped or tied. One necklace design, on closer examination, was a metallic representation of the curving skeleton of a snake.

“Good line and good form are timeless,” Peretti told the Wall Street Journal last year, adding, “I want my designs to be clear, simple but sublime.”

One of her most familiar designs was the “bone cuff,” a wide metal band worn as a bracelet. It included a noticeable protuberance in the metal, allowing it to fit comfortably over the wrist bone. Peretti got the idea from handling bones, which she sometimes stole as a child from underground crypts in Rome.

“Things that are forbidden remain with you forever,” she said.