Chic

Chic, in Dariaux's account, is the innate quality that elegance is not. It is intellectual, intuitive, partially unteachable. It has nothing to do with beauty: Marlene Dietrich had it; Elizabeth Taylor did not. It cannot be acquired through effort; it can only be diminished by it.

Dariaux defines chic most clearly by what it is not. It is not: - Beauty (Dietrich was not conventionally beautiful; Taylor was, and lacked chic) - Wealth (Princess Margaret had access to everything, and lacked chic) - Effort (the woman who tries to be chic demonstrates, by trying, that she lacks it) - Fame or position (the Kennedy family had chic; the Truman family, in power, did not)

What remains after these exclusions is something like a particular intelligence applied to one's own appearance — the capacity to produce the sense that one's choices could not have been otherwise, that they are specific to this person and could not be transferred to another.

Dariaux's most important contribution to the theory of dress is the separation of these two qualities. Chic is innate and unteachable. Elegance is learnable — the product of selection, self-knowledge, quality, discretion, and attention to the true silhouette. The whole of Dariaux's book is a manual for the acquisition of elegance. It cannot teach chic, and it does not try.

The practical implication is encouraging: elegance, the learnable quality, is superior in its consistency. The woman of natural chic who makes no effort to develop elegance will be outranked by the woman of no natural chic who applies the disciplines. The rare woman who has both — see Princess Diana — achieves something that can only be recognised, not instructed.

The woman who has decided to be chic has already failed to be chic. This is the paradox that Dariaux crystallises in the figure of Princess Margaret: access to everything, effort applied in full, and the result is conspicuousness rather than chic. Chic, in this sense, is like grace in theology — it cannot be earned; it can only be received.

See Chic and Elegance (Principle VI) for the full treatment. See Princess Margaret for the cautionary case. See Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo for the evidence that chic is detachable from beauty.