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Elsa Peretti Farewell, Elsa…
Farewell, Elsa...
There are two types of privileged people: those who keep their advantages to themselves and those who try to pass on to those who are not so privileged part of what life has given them. Elsa Peretti (Florence, 1940 - San Martivell, Girona, 2021) is one of the latter. Daughter of an oil tycoon in a conservative family, her eagerness to emancipate herself and her polymorphous creative drive led her to enter the Faculty of Interior Design in Milan. If her high lineage had provided her with an exquisite education in Rome and Switzerland, the young and determined Elsa did not hesitate to finance her career by teaching Italian and skiing. It wasn’t long before she discovered that design was her passion. When she finished her studies, she decided to try her luck as a model, becoming the umpteenth proof that beauty and intelligence need not be at odds. The year was 1964. After posing for Dalí and Oriol Maspons, she moved to New York, where she became part of the halconettes, the select circle of the glamorous Roy Halston (the most popular designer in America in the 70s, for whom she would create
Photography by
©Hilda Moray
some of her most celebrated jewelry) and Studio 54, the nerve center of the new bourgeoisie pas comme il faut that exchanged factories for cameras and brushes and gladly embraced debauchery, extirpating the demure puritanism that once characterized the upper echelons. She went a step further: if in New York frivolity was the queen, her European origins and her determination to follow her own path—which would progressively weaken her family ties—resulted in a Frenchified and sixties-tinged spirit, that which did not understand classes and crossed from top to bottom the once so differentiated social strata. Years later she would declare: “If you have been a kamikaze, like me, you can never again be a simple bourgeois.” Peretti proved that she could pose for Helmut Newton dressed as a bunny and at the same time skyrocket the profits of Tiffany & Co.’s line of silver pieces, among many other things. By the time she left the firm, almost forty years after she was hired, her designs made up 10% of the house’s revenues, which that year exceeded 3 billion euros. To paraphrase Melanie Griffith’s character in Weapons of Woman, she had “a mind for business and a body for sin,” which is more than most mortals can bear.
Snake Necklace sketches by Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co. Image from the 1990 catalog “Elsa Peretti Fifteen of my Fifty with Tiffany”
Sketches from the Bottles Collection by Elsa Peretti for Tiffany & Co. Image from the 1990 catalog “Elsa Peretti Fifteen of my Fifty with Tiffany”
Of course, her signing on as an independent designer by the legendary jewelry house was far from fortuitous: by the time she joined in 1974, she had already won her well-deserved recognition with the 1971 Coty Award, was selling her jewelry at Bloomingdale’s ( the most popular department store in New York at the time) and had captivated Grace Mirabella, director of Vogue USA, who had been selected for the position with the (textual) task of “attracting the free, economically independent and liberated woman of the 1970s to the magazine’s pages.” Her commitment to silver and irregular, organic curves (“I love nature, but I try to change it a little, not copy it”) made her Liza Minnelli’s favorite choice (elegance made impertinence) and she was immortalized in more than thirty collections for Tiffany’s, such as Bean (symbol of the beginning of life), Open Heart (of love), and Mesh (with her iconic chain-mail scarf earrings, imitated endlessly even today), Zodiac (inspired by the signs of the zodiac) or the Bone bracelet, whose plastic undulation is reminiscent of the watches in Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory”, with whom she also shared an interest in the hidden recesses of the human mind: “The moment I design something on paper, something happens. The sound of the pencil is like a thrilling echo of our subconscious.” Synergies are always reciprocal.
Peretti was always aware that she was born on the good side of the world. Also, probably, that she was different. In 1968 her passion for the architecture of Antonio Gaudí (one of her sources of inspiration) and the relaxed rural life led her to buy a house in San Martivell, Catalonia, which she would painstakingly restore over the next ten years: “I come to Spain to think and go to New York to function.” That was the first stone: for almost four decades, the Italian woman devoted herself to the reconstruction of a village that was practically in ruins to restore its historical splendor which, beyond its Romanesque temple and its Gothic buildings, still harbored reminiscences of the Roman civilization. Her love for the arts and her philanthropy materialized in various scientific, educational and humanitarian initiatives that culminated in the Nando Peretti Foundation (today the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation), focused on the defense of the environment, human rights (especially those of indigenous peoples and oppressed minorities), health, and the arts. Her creations were as well, and today are exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum, the Boston and Huston Fine Arts Museums and the British Museum, as well as having starred in exhibitions in Tiffany stores around the world and at the FIT Museum in New York, which named her Doctor Honoris Causa. Those who give, receive. And sometimes, the one who receives, gives.
“Spain gave me my success. I would never have been a jewelry designer without Spain,” she once declared. There, in her home in San Martivell, she said goodbye to the world last March, at the splendid age of 80. Her legacy, as they say, is eternal.