Jewellery brands throw the word ‘icon’ around a lot, but very few things are truly iconic. The point of an icon is distinction. A nonnegotiable ingredient is, of course, time. A design needs to prove itself against the vagaries of passing time—changes in style and fashions, the shifts in culture. One such proven icon, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, is the Bone cuff design by Elsa Peretti for the New York jeweller Tiffany & Co.
The story behind the Bone cuff is fairly famous. As a child in Rome, Peretti had a habit of visiting the crypt of a 17th-century Capuchin church and stealing little bones. Time and again, Peretti’s mother would send her back—but the fascination remained. More precisely, the verboten nature of curiosity and desire. “Things that are forbidden,” explained Peretti in one of her more famous quotes, “remain with you forever.”
The Bone cuff had a predecessor before Peretti ever joined up with Tiffany & Co. The first, which are different in shape, were crafted in wood and ivory for Halston, the American designer who was one of Peretti’s closest friends and creative collaborators. When Peretti first interviewed with Tiffany, the Bone cuff was one of two jewels that she brought with her to show the jewellery company. (The other, if you’re interested, was the bottle pendant.) The rest, as they say, is history.
The design of the Bone cuff is uniquely fluid, with organic curves and shapes. There is a domed area, for instance, that’s designed to softly accommodate the wrist bones, and cuffs have designated left and right sides. In its first few years, the bone cuff was actually made entirely by hand in single, solid pieces of sterling silver—more on that shortly—but this made them heavy and unwieldy. The Italian silversmith specialist that Peretti created these cuffs with devised a method (that was, if anything, even more challenging) of joining two pieces of silver to make the cuffs hollow and therefore lighter.
Peretti’s use of sterling silver was a revolution in fine jewellery design. For quite literally centuries and millennia before her, a large portion of the value of jewellery lay in its materials: gold and gemstones. Even Tiffany, which had been for a long time one of the foremost American specialists in sterling silver, was mostly only crafting homeware and objects in silver.
With her fluid, biomorphic shapes sculpted in the cool sheen of sterling, she advanced the idea of fashionable, sensuous jewellery. Pieces that earned and wore their value on the strength of design and aesthetic. “What I want,” she once told People magazine in 1974, “is not to become a status symbol but to give beauty at a price”.
This month, Tiffany & Co. is marking the arrival of Peretti to the house in September 1974 with new imagery as part of its With Love, Since 1837 campaign. The campaign, which debuted in March this year, is an ode to the legends and icons at Tiffany & Co. photographed in the style of the innovative window vitrine displays by famed designer Gene Moore. Peretti’s Bone cuff features in one photo with a floating hand (a nod at Peretti’s personal past as a model) with a ladybug on the index finger, a tribute to one of the most famous advertisement images shot by the photographer Hiro.
An occasion as momentous as a 50th anniversary is not limited, of course, to just new images. Through this year and the next, Tiffany & Co. will be introducing special creations, including reissues of Peretti icons with gemstones, and larger bold sizes. Already, the brand has rolled out a pair of new Bone cuffs in yellow gold, set with drop-shaped sections of pavé diamonds. The emblematic Split cuff also gets a modern reimagining as rings—quite fabulous as a sculptural statement, or as a sensually biomorphic cigar band—in yellow gold and sterling silver. Miniaturised, but no less potent and seductive in the inimitable biomorphic style of Peretti.
