From Studio 54 To Versailles: Liza Minnelli’s Jewellery Has Seen A Lot

The Tiffany & Co bone cuff coveted by every fashionista? Liza’s worn it since 1973.

The scene had all the subtlety of a sequined sledgehammer: Liza Minnelli, a performer who has often been measured against her mother, actress Judy Garland, was lounging on a sofa beneath fluorescent Andy Warhol portraits of Garland, Minnelli and her father, director Vincente Minnelli.

Minnelli, 78, was sitting in the living room of her apartment in West Hollywood, California, on a Monday afternoon in August, with a small entourage that included a manager, a personal photographer and Michael Feinstein, a singer and pianist she has collaborated with for years. Tabletops were packed with neatly arranged accolades and other detritus from her career in show business — a French Legion of Honour award here, some Golden Globes there.

Minnelli was wearing a red-collared shirt over a black turtleneck and swingy black trousers — no shoes — along with silver bone cuffs and other jewellery designed by her close friend Elsa Peretti.

Peretti, who died in 2021, has long been associated with Tiffany & Co.: This is the 50th year that the brand has been selling her pieces. But Minnelli’s relationship with the Italian jewellery designer goes back even further. The women had a mutual friend in Halston, the American fashion designer born Roy Halston Frowick, who introduced them in the early 1970s. (Halston also introduced Peretti and Tiffany, in 1974.)

He and Peretti dressed Minnelli for several occasions that would become defining moments in her life. Minnelli wore a yellow Halston gown when she accepted the Oscar for Best Actress in 1973 for her performance in Cabaret. In her television special Liza With a Z, for which Minnelli won an Emmy in 1973, her wardrobe included several pieces by Halston and Peretti, a white suit and silver bone cuffs among them.

Minnelli said Halston and Peretti helped create what became her signature look, which involved simple lines and slouchy silhouettes that allowed Minnelli — who has always considered herself a dancer first and foremost — to move freely, whether onstage or on the dance floor at Studio 54.

“He really invented me, along with Elsa,” Minnelli said. “He dressed me and she would dress the dress! It was wonderful what she did.”

Minnelli said her signature look was also shaped by Christina Smith, the makeup artist who gave her the thick eyelashes that became a beauty hallmark. Minnelli found Smith through her work with Cher. “I’ve always loved Cher’s makeup,” she said.

Minnelli, who has scoliosis, said Halston helped her choose clothes that “focused on my face, and the line of my body.”

“The up and down of it all,” she added, kicking a shoeless foot ever so slightly up for emphasis. “He always thought in straight lines for me.”

Drawing an hourglass figure with her hands in the air, she said, “My body is the wrong shape for that!”

Minnelli’s father, whose director credits include the films Meet Me in St. Louis and An American in Paris, was a costume designer early in his career, and helped her cultivate an interest in fashion. “Whatever taste I got from my dad,” she said, adding that he approved of the image that Halston and Peretti helped create for her.

“He loved it because of the simplicity and the style,” Minnelli said. “It was simple but so elegant, you know?”

Peretti is “one of those people who will always be with me,” Minnelli said, while patting the jug-shaped pendant on a necklace she was wearing — a design Peretti created for Halston before producing versions for Tiffany. Minnelli said that Halston, who died in 1990, “used to put a little flower in it.”

The bone cuffs Minnelli was wearing in her apartment, she said, were the same ones she wore to the Battle of Versailles, a showcase of American and French fashion designers held at the Palace of Versailles in 1973.

“If you put them on right, you have to follow your bone,” Minnelli said of the cuffs. The jewellery’s design is said to have been inspired by human bones that Peretti saw as a girl while visiting a crypt in Rome.

Minnelli, whose life was the subject of a documentary that premiered in June at the Tribeca Film Festival, and will be the subject of a newly announced memoir she is writing with multiple collaborators, described Peretti as very casual. “If you talked to her, she wouldn’t tell you anything, which was quite smart actually,” Minnelli said.

While reflecting on their friendship, Minnelli was more prone to give exclamations about Peretti — “Just glorious!” — than precise details about experiences they had shared.

But she was very clear about certain influences that helped her to see Peretti as a person worth knowing.

“Because of my parents, I learned how to recognise the best,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Christopher Barnard.

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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