Renowned model and jewelry designer Elsa Peretti dies at age 80

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

When Ms Peretti moved to Barcelona to become a model in the mid-1960s, her wealthy Italian family cut off financial support. It is part of an artistic enclave that included surrealist artist Salvador Dal 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 and elegant appearance, she became a favorite model of designers including Issey Miyake, Charles James and especially Halston, who only had one name.

Elsa was different from the other models, Halston once said. The others were clothes racks that you made, fixed their hair, and then they put their blue jeans back on. But Elsa had style: she made the dress she modeled.

While working as a model in New York, Ms. Peretti began designing accessories, including belts and a tiny silver bud vase worn as a pendant on a chain or leather bracelet. (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 in the shape of a rounded teardrop.

Ms. Peretti and Halston became close friends and were often seen together at New York nightclubs in the 1970s, including Studio 54. During those years, Ms. Peretti admitted to feeding only on caviar, cocaine, vodka and cigarettes. She was fluent in English, Italian, Spanish and French and often mixed the four in a conversation.

Strong-willed and tempestuous, she had a fiery temper that she sometimes turned against Halston, despite their close relationship. He had given her a sable coat to design the perfume bottle, but after a particularly heated argument, she threw it into a fireplace, where it was immediately consumed by flames. They reconciled before Halstons death in 1990.

By this time, Ms. Peretti was already celebrated for her jewelry designs. Instead of gold, she turned to silver as the main metal, preferring its clarity and relative accessibility. She often based her ideas on simple shapes found in nature, such as beans, scorpions, and snakes.

Ms. Peretti traveled the world to find qualified jewelry makers and held each item in her hand, testing its contours and weight, as if it were a living being. One of his earliest designs was a necklace shaped exactly like a kidney bean but in silver or gold. She then incorporated the bean design in countless other items, from cufflinks to handbags.

She designed teardrop-shaped earrings and used intricately woven gold and silver mesh to create a feathery metallic scarf that could be draped or tied. One necklace design, on closer inspection, was a metallic representation of the curved skeleton of a snake.

Good line and good shape are timeless, Ms Peretti told The Wall Street Journal last year, adding that I want my designs to be clear, simple, but sublime.

One of his most familiar designs was the bone cuff, a large metal band worn as a bracelet. It included a noticeable protrusion in the metal, allowing it to fit comfortably over the wrist bone. Mrs. Peretti had the idea of ​​manipulating bones, which she sometimes stole as a child in the underground crypts of Rome.

The things that are forbidden stay with you forever, she said.

She also developed the concept of diamonds and pearls by the yard, placing them widely on a necklace to keep prices lower. One of its most popular models, the open heart necklace, is a heart-shaped silver frame, with a chain passing through the empty center.

Over the years, Ms. Peretti has maintained close control over the design and manufacture of her items, which have come to include tableware, drinking glasses, and leather goods.

In 2019, Tiffany estimated that her stores around the world were selling an item Ms. Peretti designed once per minute. Items with its open-heart design were sold once every three minutes. (Last year, Tiffany was acquired by LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton for around $ 16 billion.)

The day Elsa Peretti became part of Tiffany & Co. was the day we entered a new era in our history of design innovation, said company president William R. Chaney in 2001. She has not only created a model of style and elegance that defines the contemporary. life, she forever changed the way people think about jewelry and incorporating fine taste into their lives.

In 2012, Ms Peretti announced that she was planning to retire. At the time, his designs accounted for 10% of Tiffanys’ annual sales, or roughly $ 3.8 billion. When the company offered to buy its name, designs and intellectual property, it hesitated. Instead, she negotiated a new 20-year contract, in which she retained control of her product line. She received a firm payment of over $ 47 million, plus an additional $ 450,000 per year and a 5% royalty on net sales of her creations.

That was my price for the past, Ms Peretti told Vanity Fair of the contract, which remains in effect after her death. It might sound like a lot, but after tax it’s not really for the job I did.

Elsa Peretti was born on May 1, 1940 in Florence and grew up in Rome. His father was the founder of an oil company; her mother did not work outside the home.

She was educated in Rome and Switzerland and was a ski instructor and French teacher before moving to Barcelona.

When Ms Peretti was featured in a Newsweek magazine cover story in 1977, her father was finally proud of her accomplishments and passed away months later. Ms Peretti inherited 44.25% of the shares of the company from her father. His older sister, Mila, his only brother, received 55.75%.

Ms Peretti sued her sister and brother-in-law, seeking an equal stake in the business. Its percentage of the stock was increased to 49% by arbitrage. Ms. Peretti subsequently demanded that her sister and brother-in-law buy her back. The break between the sisters never healed. Ms Peretti received hundreds of millions of dollars, which she used to create a charitable foundation named after herself and her father.

Ms Peretti never married but had numerous relationships with men, including photographer Helmut Newton. His longest relationship was with an Italian entrepreneur, Stefano Magini. Their first meeting was a heated argument after she knocked down a door in her house with her truck.

We’ve been together for 23 years, Ms. Peretti told Vanity Fair in 2014. Ten were great.

Over the years she has had homes in New York, Barcelona, ​​Rome and Porto Ercole, Italy. Her primary residence, however, was in Sant Mart Vell, Spain, a medieval village outside of Barcelona, ​​where she bought a house in 1968.

My early years, Ms Peretti told Vanity Fair, things were still in shambles, many houses had no roofs, and I slept on a bench and washed on the stone floor.

She restored many buildings throughout the city, planted a vineyard, launched a wine label, and kept in close contact with the metallurgists in Barcelona who executed her jewelry designs.

I didn’t want to become someone, she said of her retirement from the limelight. I wanted to do what I wanted, to work with artisans, with my people. They bring my fantasies to life.