Vintage Drop: Elsa Peretti Pendant

Hand-selected by our resident curator of Vintage Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos, Elsa Peretti was in a class all her own. Described by Vogue as “arguably the most successful woman ever to work in the jewelry field,” Peretti was one of only a handful of designers that were allowed to sign their own designs for Tiffany & Co.

Here, Bartos shares why she’s always loved and collected Peretti’s pieces, and what makes this one-of-a-kind pendant so special.

"I am a huge Peretti fan. How can one not be? Elsa Peretti joined Tiffany & Co. in 1974, and took Tiffany itself and the jewelry world by storm. For decades, she was Tiffany’s most popular designer. One of her earliest jewelry designs, made just for her friends, was a two-inch silver bud vase worn around the neck on a leather thong, not too far design-wise from the pendant you see here in all its refined informality. 

Peretti was inspired by the natural world, so you often see organic and free-form shapes in her work, and she wanted her jewelry to be accessible to working women. She turned silver into high fashion status jewelry, and did the same for hardstones like the vibrant tiger iron, a mix of jasper, hematite, and tiger eye that you see in the pendant here."

-Mahnaz Ispahani Bartos