A Guide to Elegance

Geneviève Antoine Dariaux. Doubleday & Company, New York, 1964. Reprint: HarperCollins, 2003. 224 pages, organised alphabetically from Accessories to Zoology.

Dariaux was the directrice of Nina Ricci's Paris couture salons. She wrote the book for an American readership — women who had money but, in her assessment, lacked the Parisian formation that transforms money into elegance. The book's method is alphabetical because Dariaux refused to acknowledge any hierarchy among the elements of dress; every detail demands equal attention.

Elegance can be guided. It is not an accident of birth, not a gift of features, not a reward for expenditure. It is the product of art — of selection, self-knowledge, quality, discretion, and attention to the true silhouette. The title derives from the Latin eligere (to select), and that etymology governs every page.

The wiki derives six principles from her argument:

1. Elegance is Selection
2. Quality Over Quantity
3. Self-Knowledge
4. True Fashion vs Passing Fashion
5. Discretion Until Eight
6. Chic and Elegance

Dariaux teaches by prescription and by example. The prescriptions are sometimes era-specific (no open-toed shoes on city streets; no black before noon; alligator at 5 P.M.) but the arguments beneath them are usually timeless. The examples name real women by name — Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich — and make precise verdicts on each. This willingness to name and judge is the book's methodological courage: it grounds the abstract principles in evidence.

The book was written for a specific social register — Hermès as a baseline, couture as a reference point. Below this register, many prescriptions apply by analogy only. Gender essentialism runs throughout: women dress partly for men's approval. This reflects 1964 norms unreflectively, and the contemporary reader adjusts accordingly. Some fashion-specific prescriptions are of their era; the principles beneath them hold.