Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti Sterling Silver Teardrop Ring with Pouch

Partnering with Elsa Peretti was one of the smartest moves Tiffany & Co. ever made in its nearly two centuries as an international behemoth of jewelry design. An Italian-born model-turned-designer, Peretti (1940–2021) signed on with the legendary luxury house in the early 1970s to craft jewelry of sterling silver, a metal once deemed too “common” for the kind of work she wanted to do. Peretti was an incredible success story, however, and her jewelry creations — of which there are dozens of collections and include the beloved Teardrop ring — have come to define the modern identity of Tiffany. Look no further than to the numbers: In 2015, Peretti’s pieces accounted for an astounding 8 percent of the company’s worldwide net sales. Their continued popularity is no surprise; Peretti’s designs are at once sumptuous and understated, simple yet expressive and, perhaps most importantly, proven timeless. 

“Style,” Peretti once said, “is to be simple.” Her most celebrated designs are some of the most minimal, and the Teardrop ring is no different. Comprising a single, elongated droplet shape twisted to fit around a finger, the piece is the opposite of most fine-jeweler-designed rings — ornate with detail and settings, topped with eye-catching gems. The Teardrop ring is sculptural and even sensual in its simplicity, reliant on little more than an evocative shape. 

Tiffany describes the Teardrop as “a solitary raindrop or a shining bead of morning dew.” It’s apt language — while Peretti credited her late-1960s-era travel to Japan and throughout Europe as having impacted her work, she also found inspiration at the beach and in other outdoor environs over the years. These influences manifested in her Starfish necklace, Snake necklace and additional natural-world designs, while tears and human emotion have been at the center of other concepts credited to Peretti: The teardrop-shaped perfume bottle she created for fashion designer Halston arguably played a sizable role in the scent’s profitable 1976 launch.

The original Teardrop began as an elegant and modern take in sculptural solid metal. Since its 1970s-era debut, Tiffany has produced riffs on the design, including platinum and 18-karat gold versions inset with diamonds, and it has been adapted for earrings and more. But to Peretti purists, the allure of the diamond-free ring endures — it exemplifies the organic forms that the name Peretti brings to mind, and challenges the notion that good jewelry must involve sparkle.

“I like objects to wear that you can put on a table as an art object," the designer said.

The Teardrop ring, indeed, would make a fine centerpiece.

In an era of social upheaval, venerable Tiffany & Co. designer Elsa Peretti reimagined diamonds as jewelry that working women bought for themselves rather than receiving it from a suitor.

By the time the Italian-born Peretti (1940–2021) arrived in New York City, she’d already studied design in Rome, worked for a Milanese architect and taught Italian, French and skiing in Switzerland. She settled on interior design as her potential career path but then chose an altogether different route: modeling. Peretti modeled in Barcelona, Spain, and on the advice of Wilhelmina Cooper — a former model who’d by then founded Wilhelmina Modeling Agency — moved to Manhattan in 1968. When she relocated, Peretti was inspired to pick up jewelry design.

After modeling for designer Halston, the undisputed fashion king of Studio 54, Peretti became his close friend and collaborator, eventually creating jewelry and teardrop-shaped perfume bottles for him. By way of her association with Halston, Peretti took to the disco scene, flourishing in a social circle that included artist Andy Warhol and fashion designer Giorgio di Sant’Angelo.

It wasn’t long before models on di Sant’Angelo’s runway were donning two-inch sterling-silver vases, complete with a rose stem, suspended on leather thongs around their necks. The accessory was Peretti’s inaugural piece of jewelry — she designed it in 1969 after finding a flower vase at a flea market. It was hardly the only time that Peretti found motifs in nature and in organic forms. In the years that followed, her Bean pendant necklace, Starfish earrings and other sensuous accessories would draw on human emotion as well as the natural world around her. Each evocative and wholly versatile design is universally adored decades later, and each was made for a storied American jewelry house with which Peretti would be associated for nearly 50 years.

It was Halston who introduced Peretti to Tiffany & Co. She had her own boutique at Bloomingdale’s by 1972, and her partnership with the firm, which signed the venturesome and unorthodox designer to an exclusive contract in 1974, would cement her place in the lofty annals of jewelry legend. Peretti’s simple but sophisticated designs — the Teardrop collection, her minimalist Diamonds by the Yard necklace and Open Heart ring, to name a few — elevated sterling silver, previously considered unsuitable for fine jewelry, and created an enthusiastic young audience for Tiffany’s offerings. In 1977, Peretti’s designs earned the jewelry house more than $6 million. (In some years, her work has accounted for 10 percent of the company’s sales.)

In 2012, Peretti signed a 20-year, $47.3 million contract with Tiffany & Co., but she passed away in 2021, at age 80. Today, her designs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the British Museum.

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