dress

The directrice of Nina Ricci's Paris couture salons on how to dress, how to choose, and why it matters. Sixty-two alphabetical entries, from Accessories to Zoology.

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.

One baby in its crib may have chic, while another doesn't. Elegance, by contrast, can be acquired by any woman of intelligence, discipline, and self-knowledge.

Evening is the only time of day when a woman has the right and even the duty to call attention to herself.

Dress is the first domain because it is the most immediately personal: it is the discipline one practises every morning, in the most literal possible act of composition. The six principles the wiki derives from Dariaux are not fashion rules. They are principles of selection, judgement, and self-knowledge — applied to the specific material of clothing.

Never seemed to age, because she never radically changed.

No woman has ever lacked elegance because of an excess of simplicity but always because of an accumulation of elaborate details or of ensembles that are badly co-ordinated or ill-adapted to the hour and the occasion.

The directrice of Nina Ricci whose Guide to Elegance gives the wiki its six principles of dress.

Dariaux's supreme exemplar of modern elegance.

Chic without conventional beauty — Dariaux's central evidence.

Chic and elegance combined — the rare case.

By trying too hard to be chic, succeeded in being neither regal nor elegant — only conspicuous.

The cost of an item is its price divided by the number of uses plus the pleasure and confidence it gives. The marked-down item worn once is more expensive than the costly item worn constantly.

Critiqued with specific precision.

Beauty without chic — the reciprocal cautionary case.

To be elegant is first of all to know oneself, and to know oneself well requires a certain amount of reflection and intelligence.

A working inventory, by hour.

True Fashion is the deep current that changes the silhouette every four or five years — the work of a particular creator, marking an epoch. Passing Fashion is the seasonal ripple concerned with details and trimmings.