Elsa Peretti: The Woman Who Turned Bones, Beans and Silver Into Modern Luxury

Elsa Peretti: The Woman Who Turned Bones, Beans and Silver Into Modern Luxury

Elsa Peretti did not enter the jewelry world through the traditional door. She came from an extraordinary Italian family, studied interior design, modeled in Barcelona, moved to New York, and found herself in the orbit of Halston at the height of 1970s fashion. What she built from there was radically simple: a bean, a bone, a teardrop, a bottle, a heart. Her genius was not in making jewelry look more expensive. It was in making jewelry feel more alive. Peretti understood the curve of the wrist, the weight of silver against skin, the way a pendant could move with the body. When she joined Tiffany & Co. in 1974, she helped change what fine jewelry could be, bringing sculptural design and sterling silver into the everyday wardrobes of a new generation of women.

Elsa Peretti's Early Life and the Decision to Leave Home

Elsa Peretti was born in Florence on May 1, 1940, the youngest daughter of Ferdinando Peretti and Maria Luisa Pighini. Her father was a powerful Italian businessman who developed Anonima Petroli Italiana, or A.P.I., into one of Italy's leading oil companies. She grew up surrounded by privilege, but privilege was precisely what she would eventually reject.

At 21, Peretti left home and began constructing a life that had little to do with the conventional future expected of a woman from her background.

Her path was unusually varied. She lived in the Swiss mountain village of Rougemont, where she worked as a French teacher and skiing instructor, then returned to Rome to study interior design. In Milan, she worked briefly for architect Dado Torrigiani. The experience mattered because Peretti never really thought like a jeweler in the traditional sense. She thought spatially. She was interested in proportion, volume, balance and the relationship between an object and the body.