John Loring, Tiffany & Co.’s Legendary Design Director, Dies

By Karen Dybis | June 10, 2026

John Loring, who served as Tiffany & Co. design director for 30 years and promoted the company worldwide with verve, died on June 6 at age 86 in Palm Beach, Fla.

In the midst of Loring’s tenure with Tiffany, The New Yorker described him as a “luxury-goods impresario, commissioning watches in Switzerland, pottery in Portugal, vases in Murano, printed silks for scarves and neckties in Como, hand-painted porcelains in Paris.”

He was also an artist. Loring’s prints and paintings have been exhibited in Europe and the United States, and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Before joining Tiffany in 1979, Loring was the New York bureau chief of Architectural Digest. He continued to write while working at Tiffany, penning 21 books about the company, including Tiffany’s 150 Years (1987), Tiffany’s 20th Century: A Portrait of American Style (1997), Magnificent Tiffany Silver (2001), and Tiffany Style (2008).

Upon retiring from Tiffany in February 2009, he was named its design director emeritus. In a statement, the company said Loring’s legacy remains an indelible part of its story.

“Tiffany & Co. is deeply saddened by the passing of John Loring, whose creativity and vision helped shape the house’s modern identity,” the statement read. “For three decades, he served as…a devoted steward of its heritage, bringing its history to life through his writing and curatorial work, while ensuring its legacy continued to inspire new generations.

JohnLoring2004 — *John Loring, design director of Tiffany & Co., at a 2004 book signing at Kent State University’s School of Fashion Design and Merchandising (photo by Jeff Glidden/The Plain Dealer)*

“He will be remembered not only for his extraordinary contributions, but also for his enduring passion for beauty and craftsmanship. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family, friends, and all who knew him,” Tiffany said.

Loring’s books on Tiffany included The New Tiffany Table Settings (1981), Tiffany Taste (1986), The Tiffany Wedding (1988), Tiffany Parties (1989), The Tiffany Gourmet Cookbook (1992), A Tiffany Christmas (1996), Tiffany Jewels (1999), Paulding Farnham: Tiffany’s Lost Genius (2000), Louis Comfort Tiffany at Tiffany & Co. (2002), Tiffany Flora/Tiffany Fauna (2003), Tiffany in Fashion (2003), Tiffany Timepieces (2004), the Warhol collection Greetings From Andy: Christmas at Tiffany’s (2004), Tiffany Diamonds (2005), Tiffany’s Palm Beach (2005), Tiffany Pearls (2006), and Tiffany Colored Gems (2007). As a Doubleday editor in the 1980s, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis worked on several of these titles.

Loring won the Design and Art Society’s Edith Wharton Award for Excellence in 1988, as well as a Distinction in Design award from Fashion Group International in 1996. He was a 1960 Yale graduate, earning a B.A. in English literature, and subsequently studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts. Loring received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 1996 and a Pratt Legends Award in 2002.

His West Palm Beach home was featured in Architectural Digest in 2004. “Furnishing the bungalow was an intimate, if sometimes tense, collaborative effort between John Loring the collector, who can’t resist temptation at any price, and John Loring the designer, who resists self-indulgence at all costs,” said the AD article. “The former has the sensibility of an ethnographer or an anthologist.

“And if he is running out of wall space on which to display the work of his friends, it is, he explains, because ‘the more of their things I can find a place for, the happier it makes me.’”

Top: John Loring at a Fashion Group International gala in New York City in 1998 (photo: Henry McGee/MediaPunch/IPX)