A life in form

IT’S CURIOUS, CONSIDERING how Elsa Peretti revolutionised the jewellery world in the 1970s, that today the reclusive, enigmatic and famously fiery designer has such a resistance to newness. She rants over continual requests for “new, new, new,” saying, with a husky flourish, “For me nothing is new. Good line and good form are timeless.

“The 21st century is not my cup of tea. I belong to another century,” says Peretti, speaking by phone from her home in Spain. Long before Covid-induced lockdowns, Peretti had retreated into splendid isolation, with only trusted staff and dogs for company in the tiny medieval hamlet of Sant Martí Vell, outside of Barcelona. It’s here that she finds the strength she needs to work, here that she’s surrounded by the nature that inspires her forms. “I had to isolate,” she says. Peretti was always ahead of her time.

The tempestuous Italian-born model-turned–jewellery-designer, creator of some of the most recognisable jewellery designs on the planet – sensual, modern-day amulets including the Open Heart, the Bean Design and the Bone Cuff – turned 80 this year. To celebrate this milestone, and to mark 50 years since the first Bone Cuff, Tiffany & Co., for