Story by Vivienne Becker
It was a career-defining moment that turned into a treasured personal connection and a memory far more precious than I could ever have imagined. Elsa Peretti was – is still – my all-time design heroine, and I had longed to interview her for years, but was always told the famously intractable designer did not give interviews, living as a semi-recluse, in Sant Marti Vell, her 16th century Catalonian hamlet, near Barcelona.
And then, out of the blue an opportunity presented itself: Elsa’s works were to be included in the permanent collection of the British Museum’s Modern Gallery, as 20th century icons of design, which of course they are. She might, I was told, only might – with a huge IF attached – agree to talk about this momentous tribute to her life’s work.
The situation was a delicate one, apparently, and I was advised to make the initial approach myself, instead of through a Tiffany PR; Elsa distrusted Public Relations. So I geared myself up to make this scariest of phonecalls, breaking the ice by mentioning a mutual friend and colleague, the late Sam Beizer, who had been Professor at FIT, New York and who I knew had worked with Elsa to develop her famous gold mesh.
The memory of the extraordinary meetings, conversations in her humble butcher’s house in Sant Marti Vell, and the friendship that unfolded from that phonecall – a story too long for this column – has been re-ignited by the recent launch of Tiffany’s new gold Bone rings – the Bone and Split.
The rings mark 50 years since Elsa Peretti joined Tiffany as a named designer in 1974, and they celebrate her truly iconic Bone cuff, one of the most famous jewels of modern times, created before she joined the company.
The ‘Split’ cuff was the original, the deep, undulating, sculpturally organic silver bangle, with a wavering split through the centre. Inspired by the bones she used to steal secretly as a child from the Capuchin crypt in Rome, but also by the bleached animal skulls and bones she kept in her intensely personal ‘museum’ collection in Sant Marti Vell, the cuff was meticulously designed and crafted to mould to the bones of the wrist, armour-like and protective, exuding both strength and sensuality – it was a war-cry for the new generation of working women of the 1970s and for women ever since.
I feel honoured to say that I believe Elsa came to trust me, just as I came to understand that behind the design genius and tempestuous capriciousness, behind the ineffable, effortless, innate style and statuesque, androgynous beauty, was a woman of poignant vulnerability, suffering bouts of self-doubt, the creative affliction; a woman of great humanity, unwavering loyalty and unflinching integrity, who cared so deeply, passionately and painfully about nature, animals, the environment, the state of the world. She didn’t belong, she said, shortly before she passed in 2021, in the 21st century.
She never sought fame for herself, quite the opposite, but rather an appreciation of her work, the knowledge that her designs were worn and enjoyed, in a way that gave her self-respect and her life meaning. Most of all, from the very beginning, she was determined to democratise jewellery, to make it accessible, affordable, comfortable and wearable, all day, every day, to debunk the idea of the jewel as a show-off status symbol. Instinctively she understood the earliest, primal role of the jewel and revived and re-imagined it as an intimate, amuletic, personal treasure, precious not for its intrinsic worth but for its meaning and power.
Her most revolutionary design, Diamonds by the Yard, has become so integrated into contemporary design language, so universally imitated that it’s easy to forget just how fresh and disruptive it was at the time, making diamonds young, modern, intimate as well as affordable, purchased as if ‘by the yard’ according to budget.
Elsa possessed a unique gift for distilling complex emotive concepts into the purest line and form, distilling them to their most potent essence. In this way she instigated a new style of modern minimalism, sculptural and sensual, its deceptive simplicity sheltering deep meanings and associations reaching back through millennia.
While she railed against the demands and constraints of corporate culture, she also knew that Tiffany enabled her to disseminate her ideas, to bring the joy of jewels to a wider audience than ever before, to make jewellery relevant and relatable. While she remembered the moment she signed the Tiffany contract, worrying as she said, that she may have sold her soul, she realised too that Tiffany could bring her the freedom and independence she so craved.
Elsa explained to me that in the 1960s she was driven by a powerful quest for independence, from her affluent, conventional Roman family, but also freedom from dependence on men. She designed jewels that women could buy for themselves, for personal pleasure; jewels to represent the hard-won freedom and independence of women of her time.
As for the new Bone and Split gold rings – surely Elsa would approve. While she introduced a whole new genre of jewellery, and gave new expression to jewellery, single-handedly changing course of jewellery history, she hated the idea of ‘newness’, detested the continual demands for something new, preferring what she called the timelessness of good line and form. She cherished connections to the past, including her own memories, particularly of Halston, for whom she was muse, and New York in the hedonistic 70s. Even as a fiery rebel, she understood how to honour traditions by re-inventing them for a new age.
Just as, hopefully, the new rings, faithful and respectful adaptations of her original Bone cuff, perpetuate and disseminate Elsa Peretti’s immense legacy. Delivering the sense of freedom and personal pleasure and power enveloped in her unique blend of style and message that continues to resonate with every new generation. Dear Elsa, I miss you.
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