In an Instagram tribute to his friend Elsa Peretti, acclaimed decorator Jeffrey Bilhuber recalled a conversation he had had with the influential jewelry designer on her 80th birthday last May. “What we must do now,” she told him, “is to invent a new language for a new society.”
The statement makes you pause and think. Peretti, who died on March 18 in Spain, had indeed already invented a new language once. She powerfully transformed the jewelry world by elevating silver and creating such forever icons as the Bone Cuff, the Bean, and Diamonds by the Yard – turning even the coldest of shapes and metals into sensual and sensuous masterpieces, the likes of which Tiffany & Co. and the world had never seen before. As Vera Wang put it, she was “a genius and a passionate romantic modernist” (Peretti received the CFDA’s Accessory Designer of the Year in 1996).
Peretti had also always been instrumental to a new, quietly burgeoning society in New York after arriving to model here in 1968. At the time, the city was in the very early stages of reinvention and a chic group, including Peretti, Halston, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, Stephen Burrows, and Joe Eula, began to form.
Peretti epitomized New York fashion at a time when the city hit its fashionable peak in the 70s, and she was part of a group of women that defined ne plus ultra chic, which they signaled out to the world from Manhattan. Think Marina Schiano, Diane von Furstenberg, Marisa and Berry Berenson, Diana Ross, and Bianca Jagger, and you get the picture.
The rest is Gotham history, from Studio 54 nights and mornings to drug-fueled feuds, especially the ones between Peretti and Halston that made everything you saw on Dynasty a decade later (or, for the young’uns, Bravo reality shows) seem tame by comparison (yes, there was a sable coat Peretti, in a fit of rage, tossed into Halston’s burning fireplace).
“You were the fire and the sprinkle, the creator and the metamorphose,” Giancarlo Giammetti wrote on his Instagram. “How can we forget you, my Elsa? Years of crazy parties, of huge fights, of complicity and rivalry!!
Peretti was the #OG New York fashion icon, and New York was the fashion epicenter because of creatives like her. She was a myth and a true influencer.
“The glamour and chic…the utter simplicity of love and kindness” is how Ralph Rucci described Peretti.
The Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation announced her death with a statement that described the legend as “a woman of extraordinary generosity, philanthropist and world-famous designer. A free, strong, courageous visionary. Her example will be remembered forever.”
It will indeed.
