My women

This piece is from the Dirt archive. It was originally published in March 2021.

 Daisy Alioto on Elsa Peretti, Anouk Aimée and YouTube.

Elsa Peretti died last week at age 80.

According to a 2014 profile in Vanity Fair, Peretti arrived in New York City in 1968 with a black eye from the lover she was leaving behind and dove headlong into the Studio 54 scene. A YouTube video, originally from 1990, called Fifteen of My Fifty with Tiffany shows Peretti narrating the jewelry and objects she designed with Tiffany over the course of their decades-long business relationship. In the video, she is turning 50. She has outlived all of her friends.

“Elsa Peretti was born in Florence in 1940, daughter of a sensitive woman and a businessman,” says the narrator. (I have to pause the video to mull over this particular turn of phrase.) I received one of Peretti’s heart designs for Tiffany as a gift, a sterling silver bookmark in a soft blue pouch.

I like that her hearts are asymmetrical. A human heart is asymmetrical because one side has to work harder than the other one, which I think is an apt metaphor for the ebbs and flows of relationships.

Seeing her designs onscreen divorced from their robin’s egg blue boxes, the talismanic nature of her inspirations comes into focus. Apples, serpents, bones, beans—they are designs rooted in the Biblical, the agrarian, the belief in weather as a thing that happens to man. The prayers to God for good happenings. And all laid out here? With this white ribbon?

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