Elsa Peretti Tiffany Co. Spain 18 Karat Gold Starfish Charm Bracelet

That a piece of jewelry inspired by nature, made of silver and with an unpretentious and understated aesthetic should capture the world’s imagination is testimony to how influential Italian-born designer Elsa Peretti (1940–2021) has been on how jewelry can be worn. One of the most beloved designs resulting from her decades-long association with revered luxury jewelry house Tiffany Co. is the Starfish bracelet, an accessory based on a delicate motif that appears as organic and animated, as if it were freshly picked out of the water rather than cast in gleaming silver.

Elsa Peretti moved to New York City at the height of Studio 54–era decadence and worked as a model. However, influenced by the fashion world of which she was a part as well as by her friendships with designers like Halston and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, she began to recognize an impulse to transform the everyday objects that captured her attention into jewelry. Her first piece was for Giorgio di Sant’Angelo in 1969. It was inspired by a flower vase she found at a flea market. Later, when models marched down di Sant'Angelo’s runway wearing Peretti’s two-inch sterling-silver vase suspended on a leather thong around their necks, the stir was enough to set her on the journey to jewelry designer stardom.

“To translate ideas is magic,” Peretti said, and the magic is evident in her nature-inspired designs for Tiffany Co. With the sensual simplicity that defines her Teardrop ring, Bone cuff and Starfish bracelet, Peretti introduced an elegant but everyday wearable look that hadn’t been seen before. She was one of Tiffany’s most treasured designers — her designs have long represented a significant percentage of the company’s global net sales. Peretti was named “Accessory Designer of the Year” by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1996, and her designs are in the permanent collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.

For the Starfish bracelet, which is part of a mid-1970s collection that includes a necklace, earrings and more, Peretti was inspired by the tactile response jewelry could evoke. Like her other celebrated pieces for Tiffany, the Starfish bracelet’s charm has a remarkable sculptural fluidity that is enhanced by the polished gleam of sterling silver, a material that was once deemed too “common” before she elevated it to luxury status. The Starfish bracelet is an enchanting representation of Peretti’s incomparable, radical and yet entirely charming adaptation of the natural world for fine jewelry.

In an era of social upheaval, venerable Tiffany Co. designer Elsa Peretti reimagined diamonds as jewelry that working women bought for themselves rather than receiving it from a suitor.

By the time the Italian-born Peretti (1940–2021) arrived in New York City, she’d already studied design in Rome, worked for a Milanese architect and taught Italian, French and skiing in Switzerland. She settled on interior design as her potential career path but then chose an altogether different route: modeling. Peretti modeled in Barcelona, Spain, and on the advice of Wilhelmina Cooper — a former model who’d by then founded Wilhelmina Modeling Agency — moved to Manhattan in 1968. When she relocated, Peretti was inspired to pick up jewelry design.

After modeling for designer Halston, the undisputed fashion king of Studio 54, Peretti became his close friend and collaborator, eventually creating jewelry and teardrop-shaped perfume bottles for him. By way of her association with Halston, Peretti took to the disco scene, flourishing in a social circle that included artist Andy Warhol and fashion designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo.

It wasn’t long before models on di Sant’Angelo’s runway were donning two-inch sterling-silver vases, complete with a rose stem, suspended on leather thongs around their necks. The accessory was Peretti’s inaugural piece of jewelry — she designed it in 1969 after finding a flower vase at a flea market. It was hardly the only time that Peretti found motifs in nature and in organic forms. In the years that followed, her Bean pendant necklace, Starfish earrings and other sensuous accessories would draw on human emotion as well as the natural world around her. Each evocative and wholly versatile design is universally adored decades later, and each was made for a storied American jewelry house with which Peretti would be associated for nearly 50 years.

It was Halston who introduced Peretti to Tiffany Co. She had her own boutique at Bloomingdale’s by 1972, and her partnership with the firm, which signed the venturesome and unorthodox designer to an exclusive contract in 1974, would cement her place in the lofty annals of jewelry legend. Peretti’s simple but sophisticated designs — the Teardrop collection, her minimalist Diamonds by the Yard necklace and Open Heart ring, to name a few — elevated sterling silver, previously considered unsuitable for fine jewelry, and created an enthusiastic young audience for Tiffany’s offerings. In 1977, Peretti’s designs earned the jewelry house more than $6 million. (In some years, her work has accounted for 10 percent of the company’s sales.)

In 2012, Peretti signed a 20-year, $47.3 million contract with Tiffany Co., but she passed away in 2021, at age 80. Today, her designs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the British Museum.

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