You can’t think of the revolution in jewellery without giving at least a thought to Elsa Peretti.
Elsa was the woman of wonders, I don’t want to call it talent because her desire to achieve something greater pushed her to be that person. She was studying between Italy and Switzerland.
After being a ski instructor in Gstaad she returned to Rome, pursued her interior design degree.
It was only after then that she moved to Milan and worked for Dado Torrigiani.
Years later she decided to move to Barcelona and start her modeling career. Four years later, Elsa found herself in New York city, manifesting her model career at the highest level possible. The 70s came around and Elsa Peretti became part of the group of models that left Halston in awe. He also named the group “Halstonette”.
“The others were clothes racks—you’d make them up, fix their hair, and then they’d put their blue jeans back on. But Elsa had style: She made the dress she was modeling her own” said Halston.
Her uniqueness was what blew him away and little by little others also started realizing that.
Elsa was always fascinated by the ability and the opportunity to create. Since 1969, she has been creating innovative jewelery for designers in Manhattan.
Her first design was for the Spanish brand, Silversmith. A leather thing necklace with a two-inch bud vase made out of sterling silver as a pendant. In 1971 she was already designing for Halston and that was just the beginning of something far greater. Elsa broke the stereotype with her material of choice, silver. In those years silver was looked at for being plain, common and a material with less value.
Some of Elsa’s greatest collections like Bean, Open Heart, Mesh, Bone, and Zodiac, in signature materials like jade, lacquer, rattan, and, of course, sterling silver, were the result of her trips to Japan, China and some European countries.
At the age of 30, she started designing for Tiffany & Co and became the shooting star of the city.
Elsa’s designs were said to be timeless and innovative, which I think has been overused by people often but in Elsa Peretti’s case you can easily see how right it is to use these exact words.
She designed pieces that are still sold by Tiffany & Co to this day and it has helped their brand to grow a lot faster and greater.
On top of all of what she offered to this world, Elsa created a charity in honor of her father, called the Nando Peretti Foundation, which has given approximately 42 million euros to 852 projects worldwide over 15 years.
The foundation’s purpose was to to help with the environment and wildlife conservation, and fighting poverty. Today` it supports a broad range of projects for the “promotion of human and civil rights, with a special emphasis on the right to education, children’s rights, and women’s rights and dignity”.
