- Header
- Elsa Peretti
- Also known as
-
Elsa Peretti
-
primary name: Peretti, Elsa
- Details
- individual; designer; Italian; Female
- Life dates
- 1 May 1940-19 March 2021
- Biography
- Designer and former fashion model. Born in Florence in 1940, Peretti studied interior design in Rome and began her career as a fashion model in Barcelona before moving to New York in 1968, where she worked for fashion designers Halston (Roy Halston Frowick) and Giorgio di Sant'Angelo. There she turned to design, and by 1971 had already won the Coty American Fashion Critics Award for design. In 1974, she was introduced to Tiffany's Chairman Walter Hoving, by Halston and Carrie Donovan, fashion editor of the New York Times. Peretti joined Tiffany & Co. that year and revolutionised the popularity of silver jewellery. Her work for Tiffany includes items of jewellery and accessories as well as tableware, in silver, gold, glass, lacquered wood, carved hardstones and bamboo basketry. Subsequent awards have included the President's Fellow award from the Rhode Island School of Design (1981), and the Council of Fashion Designers of America Accessory Designer of the Year award for 1996. In 1990 her first retrospective exhibition was held at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), New York. In 2001 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from FIT.
- Bibliography
- 'Fifteen of my Fifty with Tiffany & Co.', exhibition catalogue, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York 1990.
John Loring, 'Tiffany Jewels', New York 1999, p. 215.
John Loring, 'Magnificent Tiffany Silver', New York 2001, pp. 256-7.
Clare Phillips (ed), 'Bejewelled by Tiffany 1837-1987', exhibition catalogue, The Gilbert Collection, , London 2006, pp. 289-93.
