Case Study : Elsa Peretti for Tiffany - her design aesthetic & legacy

Tiffany needs no introduction, the quintessential American jeweller with a worldwide reputation for glamour and style. The King of Diamonds - Charles Lewis Tiffany helped define legendary jewelry design as we know it and established the diamond engage

Elsa Peretti Design Aesthetic There is no new design, because good lines and shapes are timeless. Her designs were as individualistic as Elsa herself. Peretti’s designs invite touch. Inspired by found objects, bones, beans, tears, and the like, her designs elicit emotion, and are intended to be lived with and loved, not admired from a distance.

Restraint—that rare talent of knowing how to strip a design down to its essence, paired with the confidence to leave it that way—was central to Peretti’s genius.

Elsa Peretti’s designs are in the permanent collections of the British Museum in London, England; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. As sophisticated as Peretti’s work is, it was always meant to be accessible.

“I design for the working girl” Peretti told People in 1974. “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. 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.

#Tiffany #ElsaPeretti #CaseStudy