The Secret History of the Elsa Peretti Snake Necklace
October 1974, the year she first collaborated with Tiffany on a line of radically bold silver jewelry, Elsa Peretti sat for a series of portraits by photographer Jill Krementz. There she is, at home in a red Halston caftan and her King Charles spaniels, one in her embrace, one near her looking up, waiting for their turn. Around her neck? An enormous snake necklace, fastened at the head of the serpent, the scaled links of the tail completing the piece.
Sound familiar? Fifty years later, actress Katie Holmes wears a new version of the necklace on the cover of the September issue of Town & Country. The now iconic piece, first designed in yellow gold for the Tiffany & Co Blue Book collection of 1985 has been reborn again—snakes can do that. To celebrate Peretti’s 50th anniversary with Tiffany, the house has crafted the necklace in a 40-inch special edition, which can be worn around the throat or as a belt, a versatility that is as Peretti intended.
As with all Peretti’s piece the inspiration for the Snake collection came to her in a moment of divine observation. She was an international soul. Born in Florence, educated in Rome and Switzerland, she danced at Studio 54, walked runways in New York, posed for Helmut Newton, and restored an entire village in Spain. Like the bottle necklaces she created after seeing young girls holding gardenias in their hands one summer in Europe, or the Bone cuff created to reflect the imprint of the human body on a surface, the snake too rose from real life. Legend has it someone gave Peretti the end piece of a rattlesnake as a good luck charm. From that to a necklace that is in museum collections around the world.
And if Katie Holmes—who will be starring on Broadway this fall in Our Town—seems especially at home in the 50th anniversary Peretti Snake necklace, note that that too is as Peretti intended. “The sensation of how a piece feels, when held, is as important to me,” Peretti once said, “as the fluidity of how it looks.”
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