The 128.5-carat Tiffany diamond – and the smaller rocks in the cases around it – have long been the main attractions at the celebrated jewelry store on New York’s Fifth Avenue.These days, however, the crowds head for tiny lopsided golden hearts, gold and silver teardrops, lima-bean-shaped earrings, silver and ivory cuff bracelets and minuscule diamonds dotted along delicate gold chains and sold “by the yard” for necklaces. The landslide success of these unlikely pieces has sparked the most revolutionary changes in serious tiffany since the Renaissance. And oddly enough, it all began at staid old Tiffany’s, with the arrival of tempestuous Italian ex-model named Elsa Peretti.
Scion of a wealthy Roman family and a star in the New York fashion galaxy, 36-year-old Elsa Peretti is as elegant and unorthodox as the jewelry she designs. She is equally at home in her chic, all-white mirrored penthouse in New York, on her wooden bench in Tiffany’s workshop and at the primitive chicken farm in Spain where she lives four months a year. Passionate about almost everything, the 5-foot 9-inch Peretti creates a scene wherever she goes. After one tiff with her fashion friend and benefactor Halston, she haughtily tossed her $35,000 sable coat into his fireplace and stalked out of his town house, leaving him to watch it burn. She is also obsessed with her work as a designer and dedicated to perfection. And this personal touch, her love of nature, her infallible taste – and, some say, her nearsightedness – have resulted in a whole new kind of jewelry meant to feel as good as it looks. “Since Elsa and her chums,” says Henri Bendel president Geraldine Stutz, “nothing in jewelry has been the same.”
What Peretti had was a whole new idea of what jewelry should be: more design than decoration, with simple, soft, sculptural shapes, made of natural materials. No longer serious, ceremonial and conspicuous, real jewelry has become accessible and affordable for every secretary and shopgirl. It has also become a fashionable – and a faddish – as clothing, and as much an expression of individual taste and mood. “If I have a pin on I feel more together,” says Chicago library executive Liz Mitchell, 30, who wears tasteful, one-of-a-kind pieces. “There’s also a self-image thing: I feel more like a lady, more grown-up, more adorned.”
Like Peretti, many of the new jewelry designers have come from backgrounds in art or architecture, with little technical training. Some still think of themselves as artists, fashioning each shape like a piece of body sculpture. Others regard jewelry-making as a handicraft, like pottery, and jewelry classes around the country are filled with aspiring artisans. Every Friday, Henri Bendel in New York holds an open jewelry call and nearly 100 would-be designers bring in samples, hoping for one lucky break. Customers, too, are more jewelry-conscious, and sales are bangles. “People are spending more for jewelry and they’re buying better quality,” says Kathy Capri, a buyer for Robinson’s department stores in Los Angeles. “Customers want something of value.”
This insistence on value and genuineness – and a new interest in gold – have helped break down the lines between real and costume jewelry. Such prestigious houses as Harry Winston, Bulgari and Van Cleef & Arpels still do a lucrative business in diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies, but almost all of them have also started less-expensive boutique lines. Some of Cartier’s best sellers include the $120 “rolling ring” made from three bands of different colored gold, Aldo Cipullo’s $500 “Love” bracelet and the famous $850 tank watch with Roman numerals.
At the same time, the costume houses are beginning to cash in on the quality market. Designer Kenneth Jay Lane, who made his reputation in the ’60s by imitating “important” pieces in plate and rhinestone, will have his own line of real jewelry on the market this month. Monet Jewelers, the largest costume house in the country, has started a real jewelry line called Ciani, priced from $10 to $500.
From the Pharaohs through the Romanovs to the Burtons, jewelry has always been an announcement of wealth and status. The royal houses had their own jewelers-in-residence to display their worth with exquisite jeweled objets of cloisonne and gold. More recently, designers like Jean Schlumberger at Tiffany’s created intricate, gem-encrusted jewelry for very rich Americans. For most people however, good jewelry has meant a string of cultured pearls and a diamond engagement ring – and anything beyond that has been an object of distant reverence and jealousy, a passing gleam from the white-gloved arm of a woman stepping into a limousine.
All that changed in the 1960s, one of the casualties of the decade’s turmoil. Among other transformation in values, small became beautiful. It became chic to cut back, and vulgar – as well as dangerous – to show off. Rich women and rich sauces were out. And with the new consciousness came a new attitude toward jewelry. “My feeling about jewelry changed – especially since I’ve been robbed three times,” says philanthropist Mary Lasker.  ”Most of the time I wear simple gold chains and fantasy pieces of little value.” Many rich women turned to costume jewelry: Kenneth Jay Lane’s copies of Tiffany, Cartier and David Webb made fakes fashionable for the first time since Coco Chanel. Some women, like Marella Agnelli, even had pieces of their collection made up in costume – and kept the real jewels in the vault. Others opted for lighter, simple pieces without ostentatious gems. They wanted gold without guilt.
The ’70s brought a new interest in the environment, a desire to go back to basics and a recession that underlined the value of money. Designers started using natural materials, and real wood suddenly had more cachet than fake gold. Celia Sebiri chose to work with shells, Barry Kieselstein-Cord tried feathers and Peretti rediscovered silver, ivory and gold. New themes came from nature and the environment. Aldo Cipullo made jewelry of nuts and bolts and even a gold copy of a fly that landed on his desk. Tiffany designer Angela Cummings, 33, studied shells and plants under a microscope for her designs and made a solid-gold barnacle.Peretti was inspired by everything. A piece of a leather harness she spotted in Mexico bacame the famous horseshoe buckle. A rattlesnake rattle evolved into her silver snake belt, a bout of depression led to the silver teardrop. Once, when racking her brain for an idea, she came up with a campy “idea” light-bulb pendant in rock crystal with a gold filament.
Changes in fashion were themselves a major influence on jewelry design. As women retreated to solid-colored rings, jewelry became the accessory that made the outfit new and distinctive. Bold designs and one-of-a-kind sculptural pieces became essential wardrobe elements, and name designers started to make the jewelry that would be worn with their clothes.  Today Ralph Lauren Geoffrey Beene, Anne Klein, Mary McFadden, Pierre Cardin and Givenchy all put out jewelry collections. Diane von Furstenberg, whose new line of tiny diamonds and lopsided hearts clearly derives from Peretti credits Elsa’s influence with making jewelry desirable again. “She was the one who brought a totally new concept into the jewelry field, making things you want to touch and hold,” says von Furstenberg, whose jewelry collection will gross more than $2 million this year. “That is what today’s jewelry is all about.
The tall, elegant, haughty-looking Peretti burst on the New York scene in 1968 – just as the vogue for tall, elegant, haughty-looking models was passing. Although her classical aquiline features were not in demand, her looks and vibrant personality appealed to fashion designers Giorgio di Sant’ Angelo and Halston, who quickly befriended her. During a summer visit to Sant’ Angelo’s house on Long Island, Peretti casually suggested she might like to design jewelry. Giorgio promised to show it with his next collection, so Elsa went to work. At a flea market, she had once bought a tiny bud vase on a chain, intended for the back seat of a Rolls-Royce, and with this and a drawing of a simple heart-shaped belt, she wrote to a friend in Barcelona to get them cast. Santh Angelo and Halston showed the two pieces – with amazing results – and ever since the Halston has sponsored Peretti. “I had this deep love affair with Halston without having a love affair,” she recalls. “He was the pusher who made me successful.”
In 1972, Bloomingdale’s featured a Peretti boutique and soon she was the most-talked-about jeweler in the industry. But there was no holding her back. She wanted to work with precious stones and, in 1974, Halston and Carrie Donovan, then fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, arranged for her to meet Tiffany chairman Walter Hoving and president Harry Platt. Unbeknownst to Peretti, Tiffany had been looking for a way to improve its stodgy jewelry image. “We weren’t at all happy with out jewelry,” says Hoving – but he was smitten with Elsa. On the basis of a brief conversation, a tiny coral bud vase that Elsa brought along and the Peretti jewelry that Carrie Donovan was wearing, Tiffany hired her on the spot. Later, Platt drew up a five-year contract, which gives Elsa a percentage of the profits and restricts her jewelry designing exclusively to Tiffany.
No one could guess just how successful the marriage of the maverick Italian and the dowager queen of Fifth Avenue would be. The store opened the Peretti collection with a real-life “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and it was mobbed. For the next few months, thousands of customers a day crowded into the store, standing five-deep at the peretti counter. It took Tiffany’s workrooms months to catch up on orders for “diamonds by the yard” alone; in the first year, the store sold 2 miles of them – plus 10,000 teardrops, 10,000 bean pendants and hundreds of $200 belt buckles and tiny evening-bag minaudieres .
Peretti has neither achieved nor taken her success lightly.She has gained 25 pounds, increased her intake of vodka, bracelets up her chain-smoking habit, and become so obsessed with her work that she often stays up late at night going over designs with Tiffany master jeweler Wilhelm Kalich. She has also plunged into the frantic world of the New York fashion celebrity – with mixed results. She is a close friend of Andy Warhol and hangs out a Elaine’s restaurant. She kisses the air on both sides of Bianca Jagger’s cheeks. She has learned to snap back at the paparazzi who follow her, and some say success has spoiled her. “She’s not really pleased with the inside Elsa.” guesses Giorgio di Sant’Angelo. “She has forgotten about real Elsa who had sweetness and humor and who didn’t need to have champagne every minute, make scenes like a child and be the focus of attention all the time.”
There is no showbiz nonsense about the Peretti who works for Tiffany, however. Many of her ideas come from the trips she takes four or five months each year to Hong Kong and Japan, often with Harry Platt or Tiffany design director George O’Brien. There she supervises the craftsmen who carve her tiny bud vases out of semiprecious stone and lacquer her magnolia-wood minaudieres using their ancient arts. In New York, she works at a bench in the seventh-floor workroom at Tiffany’s, where 85 per cent of the gold jewelry sold on the first floor is made. She designs with almost slapdash flair, but then translates the drawing into a meticulous wax model, shaving it to hairline perfection. The model is used to create the mold for gold and silver pieces. She also supervises the machines that stamp out shapes like her silver cuffs, which are then hand-finished. Even in the workshop, the Peretti method is revolutionary. Most jewelers work from intricate intricate three-dimensional sketches in which each jewel is specified and drawn by the designer. Elsa and Kalich work on a doodle pad, going over the scrawled lines of a new design again and again.
Peretti became a career woman almost by accident. Her father, Ferdinando, was a Parma businessman who moved to Rome with his wife, Maria Luigia, and dedicated himself, with considerable success, to building a fortune in the oil business. Elsa and her sister Mila grew up in a Renaissance palazzo near the Villa Borghese with most of the privileges money could buy: Finishing schools in England and Switzerland, vacations on the Riviera in the summer and at Gstaad in the winter, and all the comforts of Rome. But life with Father Peretti, who founded the API oil company, had its drawbacks. An old-fashioned Italian Roman Catholic father, he believed that a woman’s place was in the home. Elsa was the youngest child, but her status as the favorite was threatened by bitter clashes with both parents. “She was always warm and calm,” Mila remembers of Elsa, “but she wanted more freedom to be her own person – not the person father prescribed.”
Elsa took after Signora Peretti, herself a painter. “She always had a great feeling for design and color,” recalls her mother, who now lives by herself in Switzerland, where she paints, writes and practices yoga (Elsa’s father has retired in Monte Carlo). “When she was little she drew marvelous figures of animals, angels and such. She also had a wonderful sense of touch – curiosity in her hands, I call it.”
At 21, Elsa left home. She fled to Switzerland and got a job at her old finishing school teaching languages and skiing. “The day after her birthday, she simply walked out of the house and never returned,” Mila recalls. “It was a great family scandal.” Peretti and her parents barely spoke to each other for eight years – but on one of those occasions her mother persuaded her to return to Rome, where she spent two years getting a degree in interior design.
During those years, Elsa fell in love for the first time, with an Italian publisher, and even got engaged to be married. Fifteen days before the wedding date, she bolted for Switzerland again. “Sometimes I feel I am like an animal,” she explains now. “Whenever I get closed in, I have to run, to get away.” She landed in Milan, where she worked with an architect for a year before moving on to Barcelona. Elsa was fascinated by Spain and fairly successful as a model – especially on assignments where she wore a blond wig. “I was fantastic, I was a different person in that wig,” she says. She moved to New York four years later and found friends, fame and fortune, but Peretti still hasn’t found the man she wants to marry. “Because I am very involved in my work, I do not know very much about men,” she says. “I am like a little girl. I got hurt a few times and so . . .”
But Peretti keeps growing, and her jewelry becomes more symbolic. She has designed a crucifix and a yinyang “cufflinks of life,” and is making a Madonna. “These things mean something as well as being beautiful,” she says.
That sort of seriousness about jewelry is increasingly common. “What was missing was the marriage between the designer and the product,” says Laura Kruger, who opened a one-of-a-kind jewelry gallery on Madison Avenue eighteen months ago representing 30 artists from all over the country. “Like graphics, jewelry should be signed. There’s no reason a dumb rock should command higher prices than someone’s creative process.” Barry Kieselstein-Cord, who studied at Parsons School of Design, thinks of his jewelry as “portable art.” Each piece is cut by hand, and signed. Kieselstein’s sculptural butterfly and horseshoe shapes in silver attracted so much attention that Georg Jensen set up a boutique for him in 1974. Now he is on his own. “Jewelry has returned to being an art form,” he says. “It was art in the Renaissance and then we lost it to mass production.”
Robert Lee Morris, who designs heavy, hard-edged gold and silver pieces, considers himself “an architect designing forms for the landscape of the body.” His necklace of cylindrical shapes strung perpendicular to the collarbone moves with the body. “It describes the neck in terms of straight lines,” he explains. “It defines the neck in rational – not lyrical – terms.” Maureen Lasher and her partner Jeanne Wertleib have started doing inlay work using ivory, bone and acrylic colors with their sculptural bracelets. “We work directly with the metal using torches, hammers and saws,” says Lasher. “We don’t cast.”
