If Liza Minnelli’s jewelry could talk

ADORNMENTS

Liza Minnelli, wearing bone cuffs and a jug pendant by Elsa Peretti, in Los Anglels in August 2024. Minnelli has been wearing jewelry by Peretti, whom Minnelli met through the fashion designer Halston in the early 1970s, for much of her career in show business. ERIK CARTER — THE NEW YORK TIMES

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By Christopher Barnard

The New York Times

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. >> 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 an apartment she uses as an office and studio in West Hollywood, Calif., 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 nearly arranged accolades and other detritus from her career in show business — a French Legion of Honor 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 jewelry 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 jewelry 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.”

“I think about Halston and Elsa inventing me,” she continued. “They said, ‘Be yourself!’ I thought, What the hell is that?”

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.

They were also the same pair she wore to the Academy Awards in 2022, when she presented the Best Picture award onstage in a wheelchair alongside Lady Gaga.