Vintage Elsa Peretti for Tiffany Co. Diamond Starfish Earrings in 18k Gold

Elegant and uncomplicated, Elsa Peretti’s Starfish earrings for Tiffany Co. feel as good as they look. For Peretti (1940–2021), touch was an essential quality of good design. “I like objects to wear that you can put on a table as an art object,” she once said. Recognized for her ability to distill nature down to its essence (other revered works include designs based on a scorpion, an apple, a bean and a snake), her sleek organic forms achieve purity by a fearless elimination of details.

Peretti’s vision of the natural world was sophisticated, not sentimental — like the Italian-born designer herself. As a young woman, she left her wealthy but conservative Roman family and sought adventure in the wider world. She began a modeling career in Barcelona, where she posed for and befriended Salvador Dalí. In February 1968, Peretti arrived in New York City. There, in addition to frequenting too many clubs and parties — she was a Studio 54 staple — Peretti pursued greater opportunities in fashion and began to design jewelry. Her first piece was inspired by a flea market find — a sterling-silver bud vase on a leather strap. She had a silversmith in Spain render the first model, and when it debuted as a necklace as part of a show for Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, it was an immediate hit.

Peretti was fast becoming a favorite designer of luminaries such as Halston, and, in 1974, she signed a contract with Tiffany Co. despite her sacrilegious choice of medium. “Miss Peretti works essentially in silver, and Tiffany has not carried silver jewelry for a quarter of a century,” reported the New York Times. A fruitful partnership began, and a moratorium on silver met its end. Success followed.

Peretti’s venturesome designs bridged costume and fine jewelry, and her dazzling creations were produced with affordability in mind. As for those Starfish earrings? The concept stems from her finding actual starfish in the Indian Ocean, and they’re part of a line that Peretti designed for Tiffany in the 1970s that included a bracelet, a necklace and more. Today, the Starfish earrings are available from Tiffany in sterling silver, gold and platinum, with or without diamonds.

“My relationship with the sea is total,” Peretti wrote in a limited-edition book celebrating 40 years with Tiffany. “As a little girl, I hunted for beautiful shells on the beach . . . I watched my friends fishing, fascinated by the things I saw. The fleeting, short-lived miracle never ceased to amaze me.”

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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