A dock chain cast in 18k gold, a knot that holds what words can’t, a cuff shaped on bone. Nick Knight shoots three of Tiffany & Co. collections built like a machine — every part locked in
Tiffany & Co. – HardWear, Knot and Elsa Peretti Cuff in Lampoon Meccano
For Lampoon MECCANO, Nick Knight photographed jewels from three of Tiffany’s collections – HardWear, Knot, Elsa Peretti Cuff. Each one arrives with its own internal logic, its own set of references, its own argument about what jewelry is for.
HardWear: Tiffany’s 1962 archival bracelet and the industrial chain as design system
The story begins in 1962, with a bracelet that sat in Tiffany’s archive for fifty-five years before, in 2017, an entire collection was built around it. The central element is a gauge link — the kind of form that belongs on a loading dock, a bridge cable, a lock. Tiffany made it in 18k gold and charged accordingly. That tension is the whole point.
HardWear is not subtle about its references. The gauge link carries the logic of American industrial design: the module, the repeatable unit, the structure that works because the same principle is applied thousands of times. It carries the grammar of post-industrial urban aesthetics — the visual language that emerged when the factories left New York and the lofts filled with artists who kept the raw surfaces. It carries the subcultural weight of the chain as worn object, running from punk to new wave to hip-hop: metal as presence, not ornament.
What Tiffany did was absorb all of that and run it through their production standards. The result is an object that is too precise to be street, too referential to be merely luxury. The Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 1883 on the principle that load distributes through repetition. A HardWear link reasons the same way. The material changed. The logic didn’t.
Knot: Tiffany Knot collection and the history of connection as form
The knot is one of the oldest human technologies. Before the nail, before the bolt, before the weld, there was the knot — a solution to the problem of connection that requires no tool other than the hands and the material itself. Tiffany’s Knot collection, introduced in 2021, takes this form and suspends it in gold.
The cultural resonance is layered. The knot appears across traditions — maritime, ceremonial, decorative — always carrying the same fundamental meaning: two things bound together, a tension made permanent. In jewelry, the form has a long history, from Celtic knotwork to the sailor’s love knot exchanged as a token of fidelity. Tiffany’s version strips away the ethnographic specificity and returns the form to its essence: a loop tightened into itself, holding.
What distinguishes the Tiffany Knot aesthetically is the way it handles volume. The piece is three-dimensional in a way that resists photography — it changes as it moves, catches light differently from every angle. Knight’s interest in surfaces that behave unexpectedly in front of a camera makes the Knot a natural subject. The challenge is not to flatten it. The challenge is to let it keep its dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface, which is a different kind of engineering problem than the one the jewelers faced.
The collection also arrives with a particular social timing. Post-pandemic, the symbolic vocabulary of connection — of things tied together, held, not released — carried a weight it might not have in 2015. Objects absorb the moment they enter the world. The Knot entered a world that had recently been reminded, with some force, of what it means to be unable to reach someone.
Elsa Peretti Cuff: Bone Cuff, body structure, and sculptural jewelry design
Elsa Peretti joined Tiffany & Co. in 1974 and proceeded to spend five decades making objects that refused every convention of how jewelry was supposed to look. She died in 2021, at eighty, in the village in Catalonia where she had lived for decades. The work she left behind is among the most formally coherent bodies of jewelry design produced in the twentieth century.
The cuff is the place to start, because it is where Peretti’s thinking is most legible. The form derives not from jewelry tradition but from the body itself — specifically from the study of bones, of the way organic structures taper and curve in response to the forces they carry. Peretti studied sculpture before she designed jewelry, and it shows: her objects have interiority.
The Bone Cuff wraps around the wrist with a pressure that is not quite tight and not quite loose. The gap at the opening is wide enough to slide over the hand, precisely narrow enough to stay in place. The engineering is in the proportions, and the proportions took years to find. Peretti reworked pieces obsessively, sometimes across decades, returning to forms she had introduced and adjusting them by fractions that were invisible to the untrained eye and immediately perceptible to the wrist.
The cultural positioning of Peretti’s work is inseparable from the era in which it emerged. The 1970s in New York — and Peretti was deeply a creature of that New York, of Studio 54 and Halston and a specific kind of intelligent glamour that has not quite been replicated since — were a period when women’s relationship to jewelry was being renegotiated. The inherited grammar of jewelry as gift, as display of a husband’s wealth, as something received rather than chosen, was under pressure. Peretti made objects for women who bought their own jewelry, wore it with jeans, understood it as an extension of how they thought about their bodies rather than how they wanted to be seen by others.
Credits
Photography Nick Knight, styling Sadie Davies, executive producer @ShowStudio Charlotte Knight, creative consultant Calum Knight, executive producer Kat Davey @Liberte Productions, hair Eugene Souleiman @Streeters, wardrobe manager Olivier Van De Velde, makeup Chiao Li Tsu @Art & Commerce, manicurist Abeena Robinson @Agency 41, art director Michael Gossage, film Esme Warren, production design Andrew Tomlinson, photography assistants Lara Hughes, Gil Warner, Old Knight Kid, digital Gabriel Lloret, styling assistant Ada Matylda, production assistant Jonathan Faulkner, hair assistant Carlo Avena, retouch Epilogue Imaging LTD., talent Hunter Pifer @IMG Models
