Defining elegance is easily done – google the word, and AI gives the pat answer
“Elegance is the quality of being graceful, stylish, and refined in appearance, movement, or manner, often characterized by simple, tasteful, and effortless sophistication.”
We have all experienced knowing or seeing someone who embodies that AI generated description, but do we ever really think about how we ourselves define elegance? Or when we first saw someone who we would call elegant? Grace Kelly comes to mind, so do Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman. Mirella Agnelli had it, and Gloria Vanderbilt. And the men – Cary Grant, David Niven, Gregory Peck who had something refined and elegant in their bearing. That they were typecast in roles that reinforced our thinking of them as elegant was no mistake. The mythmakers understood the power of elegance.
In this the month of Mother’s Day, it’s fun to think back to childhood and remember moments when we thought our mothers were the most elegant creatures in the world…
My parents loved to dance. They’d go to the ballrooms, dressed to the nines, every few weeks, leaving tiny me with a babysitter, to whirl and dip until the wee hours. Mommy had several beautiful gowns, most likely homemade, that gave her the look of a princess. They’d leave in a cloud of perfume and aftershave, looking for all the world like stars themselves. My father, determined to live the American Dream, always had a convertible and Mommy, vowing to protect the hairdo she had done by Mr. Neff once a week, tied a scarf around her head, knotting it under her chin – I learned to wear scarves young! When President Kennedy was inaugurated, my parents were invited to a big Inauguration Ball. At the time, my father was President of the Madison Board of Realtors, so Mommy had to look really spectacular on his arm. But that wasn’t really her true self – she was happiest gardening or baking in comfortable clothes.
Mommy’s older sister Marion, however, was a different story. A model for many years, she was extraordinarily beautiful up to the day she died in 2019 at 102. She always had her hair done and wore makeup every day of her life. When she was young, she golfed and I have a photo of her caught on the backswing, looking as elegant as ever. I once asked for her beauty secret and she said she’d been using Oil of Olay for as long as they’d been making it, which AI tells me was since 1952, the year after I was born! Aunt Marion was elegance personified for her whole life.
I always try to infuse both my photography and my scarf designs with elegance. Silk is synonymous with grace and refinement I nearly always use natural light, what my friend Sandro Miller calls “God’s own light,” and frame the subject simply and tastefully. Many of my elegant images are inspired by Hollywood photographers like George Hurrell and Cecil Beaton. Below are some favorite portraits I’ve made over the years.
Glamour is as different from Elegance as day is from night – given my choice, I’d choose elegance over glamour any day. Glamour is flashy, shiny, sparkly, loud, but elegance is as quiet as a breeze…heads turn when an elegant woman walks into a room in a very different way than a glamourous woman. Glamour can be learned or created – elegance simply IS.
Next month I’ll be sending a dispatch from Paris – until then, live elegantly!
Susan