Geneviève Antoine Dariaux

Geneviève Antoine Dariaux was the directrice of Nina Ricci's Paris couture salons and the author of A Guide to Elegance (1964), the book from which the wiki derives its six principles of dress. She wrote with the authority of decades spent advising clients of every figure and budget, and with a willingness — rare in the genre — to name real women and judge them precisely.

Her governing idea is that elegance is selection: from the Latin eligere, to choose. It is not wealth, not beauty, not the following of fashion, but the quality of one's choices — and it can therefore be taught. The wiki takes from her the discipline of subtraction that runs through Elegance is Selection, the priority of Self-Knowledge, and the distinction between Chic, which is innate, and elegance, which is acquired. Her prescriptions are sometimes of their era; the arguments beneath them hold.