Elsa Peretti

Elsa Peretti was an Italian jewellery and object designer, model and philanthropist born in Florence on 1 May 1940. Educated in Switzerland and Rome, she trained in interior design and worked briefly in architecture before beginning a modelling career in Barcelona. She moved to New York in 1968 and became part of a fashion and art circle that included Giorgio di Sant’Angelo and Halston, while developing jewellery of her own alongside modelling.

Peretti’s early jewellery appeared with clothing by other designers before Tiffany & Co. launched her first collection on 24 September 1974. The relationship grew into one of the company’s defining modern design partnerships. Bone Cuff, Open Heart, Bean, Diamonds by the Yard and fluid silver chains translated natural forms, touch and the contours of the body into objects that could be worn daily. She also worked across tableware and decorative objects, building a design vocabulary whose scale ran from small personal jewellery to domestic forms.

Her connection with Halston remained important during the 1970s: she modelled his clothes, designed jewellery and accessories worn with them, participated at Versailles and created the asymmetric bottle for the first Halston women’s fragrance in 1975. Her independent career at Tiffany ultimately became the larger body of work. Peretti later devoted substantial resources to cultural, environmental and humanitarian causes through the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation and to the restoration of Sant Martí Vell in Catalonia, where she died on 18 March 2021.

Peretti designed from the body outward. Curves of bone, beans, tears, snakes, hearts and smooth pebbled surfaces became jewellery through close attention to scale, weight and touch. Sterling silver was central to this language because it allowed generous sculptural forms to remain direct and wearable, while gold, lacquer, diamonds and hard materials expanded the same ideas into different levels of intimacy and value.

Her objects often use a single continuous gesture: a cuff follows the wrist, a pendant hangs as a concentrated weight, a chain becomes almost liquid against skin. The forms can be sensual without ornament accumulating around them. This economy gave her work a strong identity in both fashion and jewellery while also allowing pieces to sit easily with the stripped-back clothes she modelled in New York.

Peretti’s Halston bottle demonstrates how readily the language moved into product design. The rounded vessel and offset stopper made fragrance packaging tactile and unmistakable while remaining compatible with the house’s fluid silhouettes. Her longer Tiffany career applied the same discipline to an enormous commercial range, proving that a recognisable design vocabulary could survive repetition, material change and industrial production.