How Elsa Peretti transformed Tiffany & Co. in her own fabulous image

In 1971, Elsa Peretti was still three years away from the partnership with Tiffany & Co. that would assure her status as one of the most consequential jewelry designers of the 20th century, but she already had the aplomb of a star. Wearing a tie-dye Halston caftan, perched on an Angelo Donghia chaise longue in her apartment on Irving Place in Manhattan, she explained to a journalist how she came to have it: “You must have a lot of confidence but very little compromise with yourself.”

Peretti, who died three years ago at the age of 80, exhibited both those qualities from an early age. Raised in a palazzo in Rome, she chafed at the expectations of her wealthy, conventional family. At 21, she wrote her father a letter declaring her intention to live independently; in response, he cut her off financially. Undeterred, she taught languages and skiing at her former finishing school to support herself before settling in Barcelona, where she began modeling and fell in with La Gauche Divine, a group of artists and intellectuals who opposed the fascist Franco regime. At the time, said Stefano Palumbo, the general director and a board member of the philanthropic Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which he helped Peretti to establish in 2000, “Europe was not ready for a woman who decided to be an artist, who decided not to get married, not have a family.” To her family’s dismay, she was just getting warmed up.

Peretti’s modeling agency sent her to New York in 1968, and, despite what were viewed as considerable drawbacks—“When I came here, what they liked was the blonde girl. With big blue eyes and very young. I was very tall, very dark, very skinny.… I was everything too very,” she later remembered—she became a favorite of designers like Halston, Charles James, Issey Miyake, and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, who loved her lanky frame and cropped, slicked-back hair. But modeling was a means to an end. When a silver bud vase pendant she designed on a whim for one of di Sant’Angelo’s runway shows proved to be an unexpected hit, she knew she had found her true vocation.

At the time, silver had a down-market reputation that made it a risky choice for fine jewelry. Peretti, however, insisted on using it in her collections. She sensed that grand, formal jewels were as passé as girdles and white gloves; in their place, she offered ease. Her earrings and necklaces were meant to be put on and forgotten about, with no sharp points to catch on sweaters or hair, no warnings about not getting wet, and the designer’s blessing to wear them to sleep. Moreover, she wanted women to feel like they could buy her jewelry for themselves instead of waiting to receive it from a man. “I design for the working girl,” she proudly proclaimed. The response was so overwhelming that Peretti single-handedly turned silver into a viable alternative to gold, netting a 1971 Coty Award for jewelry and her own corner at Bloomingdale’s in the process. When she began collaborating with Tiffany, the venerable house had not sold silver jewelry since the Great Depression.

Peretti’s design process was highly personal, but her biomorphic shapes gave her jewelry a rare timelessness that Tiffany’s customers continue to appreciate. “Elsa used to say, ‘Jewelry is not fashion,’ ” said Palumbo. “It does not have to be discharged as soon as something new comes along.” Her Bone Cuff, for example, which was inspired by religious relics she saw as a child and is so true to human anatomy that it must be bought to conform to one wrist or the other, is as relevant today as it was when it was designed. Her Bone Candlesticks, a riff on an X-ray of her own femur, still look modern, as does her Henry Moore–inspired Open Heart pendant. Her Diamonds by the Yard, shimmering chains that, as the name implies, can be bought at various lengths, were rooted in memories of the way her grandmother casually wore her own diamonds. Now, in addition to the long-standing classics, Tiffany is offering special limited editions of some of Peretti’s favorites to mark the 50th anniversary of this fruitful partnership. These include a diamond pavé Amapola brooch, named after the Spanish word for “poppy” and featuring a black silk bloom, and large 18-karat yellow gold High Tide earrings, which ripple like water.

Halston was instrumental in introducing Peretti to Tiffany executives. He and Peretti were close, and the fashion icon was initially delighted by his friend’s success. When he launched his fragrance, he asked Peretti to design the bottle; she obliged with a curvy flacon shaped like a chic gourd. But once her fame began to rival his own, their relationship, always intense—as Peretti liked to point out, they were both Tauruses and took slights seriously—soured. The low point came during an argument in 1978, when Peretti hurled a sable coat Halston had given her in lieu of payment for the bottle design into the fireplace of his townhouse, on East 63rd Street. She had wanted to deepen their connection with more personal conversation, she later explained, while Halston preferred to keep things superficial, a stance she found…unsatisfactory.

Even by the standards of a famously louche era, incinerating sable was impressively bad behavior. And, indeed, Peretti held her own in those years. She palled around with Andy Warhol, Stephen Burrows, Marina Schiano, Berry Berenson, and Joe Eula. She walked the runway at the Battle of Versailles. She vamped in a Playboy Bunny costume on a terrace for her then lover Helmut Newton, a scene that resulted in one of the decade’s most electrifying images. She was who Victor Hugo, Halston’s streetwise boyfriend, turned to when he needed fast cash. When Studio 54 cofounder Steve Rubell had the temerity to call her “honey pie,” she smashed a bottle of vodka in protest. Halston stepped in, and the showdown turned so heated that Warhol noted in his diary that it was enough to make him want to stay home for the rest of his life (as if).

But even while she was living dangerously in Manhattan, Peretti was building a refuge for herself in the abandoned Catalonian village of Sant Martí Vell, which she vowed to make her home after glimpsing it in a photo in 1968. As soon as she earned the money, she bought and renovated two of its decrepit buildings, then two more, until she had put her stamp on the entire village. She created workshops for the artisans who crafted her jewelry, guest quarters, and living spaces for herself. Although she owned far more luxurious residences, Sant Martí became her home base. She spent the final few months of her life there.

When Palumbo first met Peretti, her insistence on art directing her environment was immediately evident. She interviewed him not in an office but at her summer house overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, under a pergola of strawberry grapes. A few days later, the pair traveled to Jordan to attend a summit on environmental conservation. After the conference, Peretti suggested they rent a car and explore the Jordanian desert. As they neared the ruins of the ancient city of Petra, she announced that they needed music. They stopped at a roadside kiosk, where, to the delight of the proprietor, she requested a cassette by the great Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. For the rest of the trip, that was their soundtrack. “Even in the car, she needed to create her own artistic atmosphere, ‘a room of one’s own,’ as Virginia Woolf wrote,” said Palumbo.

Rebecca Dayan, the actor who played her in Netflix’s Halston, thought Peretti deserved her own show. Palumbo has an even bigger idea. Describing Peretti as a jewelry designer, he said, doesn’t begin to encompass her impact. Instead, “she is a protagonist of history. She belongs not to the history of fashion or design but to the history of art.”