Jacqueline Kennedy

Verdict: Exemplar — the supreme case.

Never, to Dariaux's knowledge, caught in a lapse of elegance. Always youthfully and casually dressed, in a fashion perfectly adapted to modern life, to her official position, and to her individual type. Women's Wear Daily named her "Her Elegance."

What distinguished her was not luxury but adaptation — she dressed precisely for the life she actually led. This is the Third Principle — Self-Knowledge — executed with discipline at a national scale, under conditions of extreme public scrutiny, without a single visible concession to vanity or fashion pressure.

Dariaux's use of Kennedy as the supreme exemplar is instructive in what it does not say. She does not claim Kennedy was the most beautiful, the most expensively dressed, or the most fashionably dressed woman of her era. She claims Kennedy was the most elegantly dressed — which is an entirely different thing. The distinction is the book's central argument.

The further lesson of the Kennedy case: elegance under scrutiny. The woman who is watched by millions cannot afford the small lapses available to the private individual. Kennedy's achievement was to make this scale of self-discipline invisible — which is itself one of the properties of elegance.

See Self-Knowledge (Principle III) for the theoretical framework. See Discretion Until Eight (Principle V) for the understanding of occasion that Kennedy exemplified across a public life conducted in the fullest glare.