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I moved into the Franconia hotel, on West 72nd Street. “New York was in the middle of a garbage strike. “I arrived with a black eye, from my lover, who didn’t want me to go,” she says. On a cold day in February 1968, she landed in Manhattan. Peretti became intimate with la gauche divine, intellectuals opposed to Franco. “The Marines, the whores, the flowers, the ocean,” she reminisces. Elsa’s father and her mother, Maria Luigia, both of them severe, stopped speaking to her for years.įranco-era Barcelona was gritty and raffish, but it was heaven to Peretti. Peretti eventually fled to Barcelona, where she tried her hand at modeling. But after 1961, when Elsa rebelled and ran away from her highly conservative family in Rome, the purse strings were cut. Her father, Ferdinando Peretti, in 1933 founded Anonima Petroli Italiana (API), which became a giant oil-and-energy corporation. Peretti didn’t need the money she was born into one of Italy’s wealthiest families. “It might look like a lot, but, after taxes, it’s not really, for the work I’ve done.” “It was my price for the past,” she told me shortly after the deal was announced. Peretti, in addition to increased royalties for future sales that will bring her many millions, received an immediate $47.3 million payment. The company reportedly made a substantial offer to buy the rights to Peretti’s brand and its intellectual property, but six months passed before an agreement could be reached.įinally, on December 27, Tiffany announced a new, 20-year contract with the designer. So there must have been much alarm at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in May 2012, after Peretti expressed a desire to call it quits. (In 1973, Halston had sold not only his company but rights to his name to Norton Simon Industries, later to his great regret.) But thanks to savvy advice from Halston, who helped her negotiate her first contract, Peretti retains ownership over her name and all her designs. Thus Peretti has earned billions for the firm since she signed with it, in 1974-far more than any other designer in its stable. Being a Taurus, as she frequently makes note of, Peretti has soldiered on stubbornly, for which Tiffany is no doubt grateful: her designs have long represented 10 percent of the company’s global net sales, which totaled $3.8 billion in 2012.