Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo

Verdict: Chic without conventional beauty — Dariaux's central evidence.

Dariaux cites Dietrich and Garbo as the clearest evidence for her central claim about chic: that it is entirely detachable from conventional beauty. Neither woman was beautiful in the era's prescriptive sense — not in the way that the term was applied to Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor. Both possessed chic in such concentration that the absence of conventional beauty was not registered.

The instruction is corrective. Stop measuring elegance by inherited categories of looks. A woman who is conventionally beautiful and who lacks chic will be outranked, in Dariaux's calculus, by a woman of no particular conventional beauty who possesses it. The categories are wrong. The qualities they are meant to measure are not the qualities that produce elegance.

The Dietrich and Garbo case also clarifies what chic is, by showing what it is not. It is not beauty. It is not the perfection of features. It is an intellectual and physical quality — a particular way of inhabiting one's own appearance, of making one's own choices, of producing the sense that the result could not have been otherwise. It is unteachable because its source is the person's particular intelligence applied to their particular material.

See Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor for the reciprocal case — beauty without chic. See Chic and Elegance (Principle VI) for the full theoretical treatment of the distinction.