Elsa Peretti

Fashion Design  Apparel Definition

Florence, Rome and a Training in Interiors

Elsa Peretti was born on May 1, 1940 in Florence, Italy, the daughter of a well-to-do Roman family. Those two cities frame the start of her story in different ways. Florence is her birthplace, while Rome is the city of her family and of her education: she was educated at the Volbicela School in Rome and took a diploma there in interior design. That qualification matters because it is not a jewelry qualification. Peretti arrived at jewelry with a training concerned with rooms, objects and the way things are arranged and used in a space, rather than with a conventional apprenticeship at a jeweler's bench. Read carefully, that sequence explains a great deal about the career that followed. A designer trained to think about how objects sit in an interior, how a surface is finished and how a form is seen from across a room brings a sculptural, object-first way of thinking to pieces that are worn on the body. It also helps explain why her work in New York soon spread beyond jewelry itself into the containers for a fragrance and cosmetic line: designing a bottle or a case is, in effect, interior design at the smallest scale, an object whose form, weight and finish have to work in the hand and on a dressing table at the same time. The diploma is therefore not a biographical detail to be passed over. It is the foundation on which the rest of the definition rests, and it marks Peretti out from designers whose training was in metalwork alone.

New York in the 1960s: Jewelry for Other Designers

Peretti moved to New York in the 1960s, and there she began designing jewelry for a handful of top designers, including Halston, Oscar De La Renta, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo and Tiffany. The wording of that career step deserves attention. She did not begin by launching a label under her own name; she began by designing for other people's houses. Working for a handful of top designers, rather than for one employer, meant working to several different briefs at once, each house with its own clothes, its own customer and its own idea of what a piece of jewelry should do next to a garment. Jewelry designed to accompany clothing has a particular discipline: it must complete a look without overwhelming it, it must read at the distance of a runway or a room, and it must belong to the designer's collection rather than to the jeweler who made it. That Peretti was taken on by several leading names in the same period shows how quickly her work fitted that discipline. The list also spans different kinds of fashion business. Halston, Oscar De La Renta and Giorgio di Sant'Angelo were clothing designers, while Tiffany was a jewelry house. Designing for both kinds of client in the same years placed Peretti at the junction between fashion jewelry and fine jewelry, able to work for the people who made the clothes and for the house that sold the jewels themselves.

Halston's Containers and Tiffany's Best Sellers

Two achievements sum up the range of Peretti's New York work. For Halston she designed the containers for his fragrance and cosmetic lines, as well as jewelry. A fragrance container is a demanding piece of design: it is handled daily, it stands on display, it has to be recognisably the designer's object before a word is read on it, and it has to be made in quantity without losing the quality of the first example. Assigning that job to the jewelry designer rather than to a packaging department shows how far her role at the house extended, from pieces worn on the body to the objects that surrounded the brand. For Tiffany she designed many of the house's best-selling items. Best-selling is the key phrase. A jewelry house can carry unique pieces and exhibition pieces that are admired and rarely bought, but its commercial life depends on designs that customers return to year after year and that can be produced and sold repeatedly. To be the designer behind many of a famous house's best sellers is therefore a different kind of success from critical praise: it means her designs became part of what customers understood the house itself to be. Put the two achievements together and Peretti's definition is complete in outline — an Italian designer, Roman-educated in interior design, who moved to New York in the 1960s and designed jewelry for Halston, Oscar De La Renta, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo and Tiffany, containers for Halston, and best-selling pieces for Tiffany.