The biggest and least known woman in fashion: Elsa Perretti

Netflix has another fashion hit on its hands: Halston. Watch it if you love fashion, a dash of sex, Studio 54, and New York in the 1970s, and if you don't get queasy when smoking is featured in every scene.

Even the army around Halston was colorful and important for his career, because success is almost always a gesammtproject. For Halston, his model and muse Elsa Peretti was the cherry on the applesauce. She catapulted his designs to the highest fashion echelon. She came up with a fitting hairstyle for the kimono dress and she blew the bottle (whoever says bottle must write punishment lines, did you know that?) of his first perfume. No matter how beautiful and groundbreaking the bottle was, Halston didn't really want to pay for it. In the end, he gave her a fur coat that she later set on fire during an argument as a symbol of their lost friendship.

Through the series, I have become more in love with Elsa Peretti than with Roy Halston, to be very honest. The latter is, in my opinion, a bit too unfriendly and a bit too focused on money and fame. Not Elsa. She chased her dreams. As a child of a wealthy Italian oil family, she left for New York to make it on her own. Her family was quite conservative and she became estranged from them. She accidentally became a model, which she found ‘fine but boring’, then worked for Halston and was a key character in the artistic scene of New York.

Helmut Newton fell in love with her and photographed her as a bunny among the skyscrapers of New York, a photo that belongs to the cultural heritage.

Anyway, Elsa shook Halston off and became a jewelry designer for Tiffany’s. Responsible for 10 percent of the jewelry house's revenue, she was, like Paloma Picasso, one of the stars of the house. Something that Halston could walk around his house seventeen times in jealousy over.

She is especially famous for her T-cuff bracelet design where you just see a sexy part of the woman's wrist. But also her rings, her T-ring: everything has a similar floating signature.

Peretti never married and, apparently, died content. This year, on her eightieth, she slipped away during her sleep. She had a rich life and lives on in her foundation, the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation, which has donated 42 million to 852 projects in the first 15 years. Why do you want to know this? Because she is a fashion icon who has remained far too unknown. And because you might put her beautiful jewelry on your wishlist. And if you find that too expensive, you can always see her work in the British Museum if you are ever in London.