![]() ![]() As Tiffany’s president (and scion) bluntly put it, “You don’t need a rich sugar daddy to afford Elsa’s jewelry. Peretti’s use of silver broadened the definition of what fine jewelry could be, and created a whole new class of customer, women buying jewelry for themselves. Helmut Newton, Elsa Peretti as a bunny, Halston, New York, 1975. He fundamentally changed the nature of fashion photography through his edgy approach to subject matter, and strong formal intuition. “What I want is not to become a status symbol, but to give beauty at a price.” One of the ways she did that was by working with sterling silver, which Tiffany had edited out of its jewelry offerings in the 1930s. Renowned for his carefully composed, cinematic photographs, Helmut Newton was one of the 20th century's most influential photographers. ![]() “I design for the working girl,” Peretti told People in 1974. ![]() Taking inspiration from the natural world and found objects heightened the timeless quality of Peretti’s designs, which many people found to have beauty both as accessories and as pure design objects.Īs sophisticated as Peretti’s work is, it was always meant to be accessible. She designed when she was inspired to, not against a calendar, and she insisted on quality. Legacy Though born to privilege, Peretti made her own way in the world her vision was democratic and what we would today call sustainable. She also studied interior design in Rome and worked with an architect in Milan before moving to Spain in 1964, where she mingled with Salvador Dali, and “was an intimate,” as Vogue’s Joan Juliet Buck reported, “of la gauche divine, the divine left-intellectuals opposed to Franco.” Set adrift financially, Peretti supported herself by teaching Italian and skiing at her former finishing school. A new exhibition of Newton’s life work at the Australian Jewish Museum in Melbourne (open until 29 January 2023) attempts to. “I am a major adult and free, and I decide to live a life,” she wrote to her father. I was doing all those things, all the time, all the time.” In 1961, aged 21, she finally broke out. “The kind of romantic who decided to become an architect after falling hopelessly in love with Italian columns.” Peretti was raised in Rome in a Renaissance palazzo that seems, over time, to have become something of a golden cage.Ī restless teenager, Peretti told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, “I was escaping from my house, at the seaside, when I was 15, just to run, at one o’clock in the morning, to watch the sea and watch the moon. “She was a ‘fantastic’ little girl, polite, diligent,” reported The Miami Herald in 1973. The Girl in the Gilded Cage Elsa Peretti, the second daughter of an oil magnate and an artistic mother, was born in 1940 in Florence, Italy. Photographed by Deborah Turbeville, Vogue, February 1975 Halston, at home, with Betsy Theodoracopulos (seated) and Elsa Peretti, both wearing his designs. ![]()
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