Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor

Verdict: Beauty without chic — the reciprocal cautionary case.

Both women possessed beauty in such measure as to define the era's standards for the quality. Neither possessed chic, in Dariaux's reading. The jewels did not supply it. The fame did not supply it. The careful dressing — and both women dressed carefully, expensively, with access to the finest — did not supply it.

The lesson reinforces the asymmetry at the heart of Dariaux's sixth principle: chic is innate and cannot be acquired, and beauty — however remarkable — cannot be exchanged for it. They are different qualities, measured by different faculties, and the possession of one does not imply the possession of the other.

The Taylor and Hayworth cases are among the most useful in Dariaux's gallery because they resist the natural assumption that extreme beauty must produce elegance, or at least approach it. They demonstrate that elegance is a discipline, not a gift of features, and that the gift of features can, in practice, work against the discipline — by making it seem unnecessary.

Beauty can be a distraction from elegance. The woman who is told she is beautiful often does less work on the disciplines that produce elegance, because the social feedback she receives does not require it. Dariaux's implicit recommendation: treat beauty as irrelevant to the question. The question is always: what discipline of selection, self-knowledge, and restraint is being applied?

See Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo for the reciprocal case — chic without beauty. See Chic and Elegance (Principle VI) for the full theoretical framework.