I can’t say that I’m an expert at conveying elegance. I can’t even say it’s something that I aspire to achieve. As with a lot of hasty fashion phrases that are over used and often misunderstood, I often question whether they are actually relevant or whether people use them for the sake of a phrase. ‘Elegance’ is one of them. I can appreciate elegance but I’m baffled when people expect me to epitomise it. For example, when certain fashion-lovers wrinkle their noses at anything that isn’t supremely ‘elegant’ or rather, they tend to fear the unknown. Frankly I want to run away feeling all scared and small, when faced with the word.
However, Alber Elbaz seems to always portray that e word with a a quirk, a wit and his designs aren’t simply there to just blind us into submissively saying ‘Oh…that’s so elegant!’. The pre-fall collection is a prime example of this unintimidating kind of elegance.
"Nonchalant, easy and very luscious." is how Elbaz describes the collection and I love how it is inpsired by female designers that made an impact in fashion in very different ways. When people think of the likes of Chanel, Lanvin and Schiaparelli, they will again conjure up that ‘e’ word and look back at them with a dusty nostalgia. But then they miss the beat and forget that these women were designing in a radical way and doing something quite different for their times, the equivalent of what people like Margiela is doing today. I guess people prefer to fantasise though and keep the past quite romanticised. Alber has taken the fantasy and the reality of these designers and interpreted them in this pre-collection, a taster for the main collection to come perhaps?
I love Alber Elbaz and the clothes that he designs.
He’s just such a cute (probably not a word he would want to be called) little man, with his specs and bow tie. What’s not to love!
Keep up the great work. Love reading your blog.
To me, elegance has much to do with attitude and carriage, and can exist outside of apparel. The way a hand is used, the tilt of a chin. However, when applying it to fashion I always think of something exquisitely well done and simple, with no extraneous details. Everything in its place. Stopping before superfluity. Restraint.
I think Suzanna is exactly right when describing elegance. To me it has always had more to do with how the person carries themself than what they are wearing (but that can effect it too)- I always see girls in exquisitely elegant dresses who have sense of themselves and it throws off the whole dress.
That would be what my definition is too… sadly when people do use it in the context of actual clothing, it gets used with smug superiority… which I find very irritating…
It’s a shame the model showing the elegant clothes doesn’t have more than one “look” in her repertoire. Otherwise I agree with the previous posters – elegance is more than just the fabric on your body. It’s a feeling, an attitude.
Dear Susie,
Let me just start off by saying that its not others but you who seem to misunderstand elegance. Elegance is not in the clothes but in the person wearing them. This is obviously something you’re not aware of. I read your blog on a regular basis and I must applaud you on your fun and creative styling ideas. I have also been fortunate enough to see you IRL when I was attending the shows during last London fashion week. From what I’ve seen, I can simply come to the conclusion that your fear of elegance is because of your total lack of it. You don’t wear your clothes but they wear you. Even when you wear Lanvin, you still manage to make it look cheap and tatty. See, that’s the difference between being elegant and not being elegant. With elegance, you could wear a rubbish bag and still have people thinking you look great. And if you lack it, you can make elegant Lanvin pieces look like tat. It was with elegance that Izzy Blow could get away with anything, and Anna Piaggi sure knows how to wear those ensembles in a graceful way.
So, don’t be scared of elegance, learn to master it (and learning a bit about make up and hair sure wouldn’t harm you) and then maybe you’ll wear your clothes and not the other way around. Now that would do some justice to those creative ideas of yours.
PS. Radical and elegant most certainly go hand in hand. In fact, they’re best friends.
oh, elegance and glamour; two words that make me want to throw up because…WHAT ARE THEY?!
but, if they are these clothes, they can stay (:
Dear CM,
You raise some interesting ideas during this assault on susie (would you like to read the first paragraph of her post again before launching such a tirade again?). I agree wholeheartedly that ones attitude and more importantly ones natural grace has more to do with elegance than a designers creation. Do you really believe that a person can be elegant whilst wearing a bin bag, seriously? I feel that you are a prime example of someone who over uses the word elegance. I am sorry but have you read a dictionary? Fortunately I have and it seems that my grasp of the English language is seemingly better than yours. My English dictionary is not close to hand but let’s turn to an online definition for help shall we:
Elegance is defined on answers.com as:
a) Refinement, grace, and beauty in movement, appearance, or manners.
b) Tasteful opulence in form, decoration, or presentation.
c) Restraint and grace of style.
It suggests to me that radical and elegance do not go hand in hand as you say, I suggest to you that ‘elegant’ and ‘radical’ are far from best friends, they eye each other with suspicion and unease. Please don’t get me wrong though (I can see that you like to jump to your own conclusions all to easily) one can be radical and elegant at the same time (you have listed some good examples, particulary Ms Blow) but they don’t go hand in hand. I am interested to know how you think a person masters elegance. Can elegance be found in a makeup bag, are there hints within the favourite pages of your magazines?
Steve – that was very eloquently put. Also CM, but why the sorry judging of Susie? Are you yourself subject to such criticism? I appreciate fashion is to be judged being material, but it also runs deeper. An attack on someone’s style is somewhat personal.
Yes I think radical and elegance are related – like two sides of the same coin. But they stand in tension with each other. Both Vivienne Westwood and Ms. Blow are examples of this. Both have demonstrated elegance in shape and form (Ms. Blow seemed to be born with in your face elegance, whereas Vivienne Westwood’s has grown with her), alongside the ridiculous (rubber/punk/hats). I’m sure neither have found this tension easy – both creatively brilliant – both wearing their fashion heart (or actual heart) on their sleeve.
I am in utter respect of people who can do that. Many people hide behind their fashionista sleeve. Even though Susie may not claim to aspire to elegance – she certainly wears what she dreams/thinks/feels. It’s taken me a longer while to do the same. I’m a delicate bunny. I respect what people think of my clothes – but I do take it personally.
I love Alber Elbaz. The clothes do look nice. I have a very ethnic figure, so I can’t wear them, but I still can admire.
I think Elbaz does a good job of keeping in mind the ideas of Lanvin when she started her line, and meshing them with his own modern ideas, resulting in some really beautiful work. I love how he uses yellow, a color she used to love.
I covet that tiered dress on the right…so beautiful and effortless.
I think these cuts are absolutely amazing and I especially like the versatility of those waists. Great for women with narrow hips like myself, and other cuts to suit those with more pronounced proportions. Excellent tailoring…
Dear CM,
I’m so sorry of my utter lack of elegance. As I said, I fear it because I don’t have it. But the crux of it is, I don’t particularly want it. It is not something that I ever will achieve nor do I wish to achieve it. I carry insecurities about the way that I look, the way my body is, and above all, the way I fit into the fashion industry hence why at shows, I appear to be completely inelegant. This isn’t a self-diss. This is just a fact that I’ve accepted about myself in the way that someone is dyslexic or physically impaired. Despite those difficulties though, I still as Row puts it ‘wear my fashion heart on my sleeve’. I feel things for clothes in such a way that what I want, I wear without much regard for consequence. Elegance is an attitude, and something that I can admire but it’s not something I want for myself because I know my personality could never carry it off. By your definition, to look stylish or to be fashionably accomplished, elegance is absolutely key. Then I would have to disagree and say that fashion/style has many facets, guises and results. Elegance is not something that is absolutely required in order to be stylish. That is not to say that I myself think that I’m some sort of super stylish gal… I’m not. But I believe that it is possible that stylish is multi-faceted and that the definition of elegance should not be broadened and used as some sort of wide umbrella.
I can concede I don’t have it. I’m never going to have it. I don’t think I ever want it. I am going to be a mussy-haired, sans make-up, messy kinda person. I’m 24 yrs old, rushing to shows, feeling a bit weird as a ‘fashion blogger’ and not ‘properly’ in the industry, feeling like everyone knows everyone and feeling like I’m a bit of a loser. I’m worrying about whether my full time job is suffering because of my dual life. I’m worried about my boyf getting peed off from my going to shows all the time. So no, I’m not going to be the picture of elegance. I’m not going to meet your standards. For that I apologise. I try my best and if the price to pay is that people recognise me in real life (such as yourself) and feel that I make everything look like cheap tat, then so be it.
Finally, regarding elegance and radicality – Row’s comments above perfectly sum up how I feel about the two. I never pitted the two against each other by the by if you read my post again. Thanks Row for the expansion on a rather complex subject.
Also, CM, please do say hello and give me hair and make-up tips next time you see me. I so very much look forward to that…
keep creating fantastic collections! im a fan of yours
i admire a girl who stands up for herself… well done, susie.
SB, I have to come back here and make another comment:
You have something MOST people do not and will never have: true originality.
Add to this creativity and personality. You stand apart from the crowd, and when you stand apart from the crowd there will always be detractors.
Your readers love your blog for these very qualities. So you don’t fit CM’s definition of elegance. So what?
You are an artist.
CM, the blog is called ‘style bubble’ not ‘pictures of suzie looking gorgeous’.. suzie writes the blog about Fashion, and uses photographs of herself to illustrate her points, not as an arena for self indulgent self portaits.. the fact that she uses the particular type of self image that she does in her blog only goes futher to show her real grace and elegance. these things cannot be found in a makeup bag or in a can of hairspray.
i think self-awareness is elegant, which you seem to have…
CM, do you have a life? Or does it just revolve around looking at someones fashion blog who obviously speaks from the heart about how she feels. Mybe you should make one (a blog I mean, but maybe a heart wouldn’t go a miss either) and see how popular you become, I can take a guess that it wouldn’t be as successful as Suzies original and heart warming one.
Elegance is very difficult to quantify, but I believe it is more to do with attitude and poise and less to do with clothing. An elegant person can wear something very simple because they don’t require anything else to make an impression, but few people genuinely possess it.
Elegance is grace and self confidence. Maybe you’re not elegant or maybe you are, who’s to say, but if you do not strive to be it it matters not a jot whether CM or anyone else thinks you are.
You just keep doing your thing…with or without makeup!
I also wanted to say that your blog often makes me feel a little triste, that I did not have your chutzpah, and dress up as I secretly wished to when I was 24. Instead I was working at Vogue House in black pencil skirts & twin sets and heels. Sure I looked like the epitome of elgance. I also looked ten years too old for my age. I wish so much I had taken advantage of my age & experimented, & now I am too old. I’m a little jealous of you, I think!
BTW – I once missed an entire day of shows at LFW when I was 24 because I didn’t know what to wear, and was too scared to go on my own. So good on you for going, regardless sweetheart. ( And look at me now: my 24th season of shows this tme round! No fear for me any more!) LLG xx
CM is an arrogant, ignorant b****. elegance is too often an old-fashioned idea which encourages women to hide behind their ‘elegant’ clothing and hair and make-up, rather than express their true individuality and style through their clothing, like Susie does. If I had to choose between elegance and the amazing blend of creativity, originality and self-expression that Susie epitomizes in her unique outfits, I would certainly go for the latter. Yes, elegance is great, and admirable, when it is a truly natural attitude (as it was for the women Elbaz is inspired by), but I don’t think it should be made into an ideal towards which all women should strive, unless it comes naturally to them, or we would be completely missing the point of fashion. Rather than aspiring to dress elegantly, shouldn’t we aspire to dress like ourselves? Blow and other such women didn’t aspire to be elegant- they dressed the way that they wanted to, and because of that, their natural elegance shone through.
I was going to write an eloquent, crushing response to CM’s comment, but it’s already been done so well, and I can’t be bothered now.
But for the love of God, why the hell is someone wasting their time reading a fashion blog by someone who’s style they do not admire? How stupid! If you don’t like it, or it gets you so riled, why read it?! The time could be better spent getting a life.
Susie, don’t worry about readers like this. Look at people like CM as a positive, if someone is having an adverse reaction, then the opposite (an extremely positive reaction) is happening, too. I think CM will find themselves very much in the minority- a minority that appears to lack basic comprehension skills, as they do not appear to have picked up several key points in your post.
Gah my initials are CM and I’m embarassed to share them with such a nasty poster…Susie, you’re great.
Susie, I must applaud you for your elegance in writing and standing up for yourself. You are crystal clear in stating your point and you have an acceptance of who you are, style wise, or fashion wise.
Keep it up. I admire your guts and gumption. You are brave and has the guts to wear your fashion !
Hi Susie,
I read your blog daily and your posts really inspire me to take more risks with how I dress. I’m usually guilty of having an idea of what I’d really really like to wear, but chicken out and take the ‘safe’ route with jeans and a top.
To me, elegance is great, but something even better than that is having the self-confidence to dare to do (or dress in) whatever you want to, conventional standards be damned. 🙂
I think it’s great how you are so passionate about your interest and thanks for always having interesting stuff to read!
Rather than hearing people say, “Look at that, you’re so elegant”…I’d prefer someone to say “Wow, you are so Diana”. And you Susie, are so Susie..you have that style that makes people say, “That is so Susie Bubble”…you have added a new word to the fashion world besides elegance, grace, etc.
Thank you guys for seeing that my style has imperfections and that elegance isn’t the be all and end all……I never said I wanted to be elegant nor do I wish for it…..
I’ve been rather out of the fashion blog circuit for the last few days, but to be honest, elegance is a bit overrated. We might hold, say, Audrey and Katharine Hepburn on a pedestal today, but they did push more than a few envelopes for their times (Audrey by not fitting into the mould of what was traditionally considered ‘womanly’, Katherine by taking to a form of clothing that was initially considered the preserve of men). Susie was bang on target when she said that we’ve just romanticised them into the idea of old-school elegance, because old-school elegance was not what they were in their day.
As for the wider issue of ‘how to wear’ a designer’s creations and ‘how to carry them off’ (note, I’m putting all that in quotes)- the question must be asked: what does Susie, or any one of us getting dressed in the morning, hope to achieve when we put an outfit together? Also, is the whole point of buying a certain item of clothing meant to be that you wear it exactly as the designer intended? Where’s the independent thought, or the creativity in that?
The suggestion that elegance and style are necessarily synomymous isn’t one that sits well with me- it smacks too much of fusty old style commandments, and truthfully, it takes a lot of the fun out of life. As Susie has said, elegance, the way it’s conventionally understood, has never been her objective- and it would be frightfully restrictive if it were. Style, as I understand it, is about the individual. Susie’s dress sense is certainly reflective of who she is and what goes through her head – and it’s so much more interesting to see that than ten pages of perfectly styled outfits in magazines. If that kind of ‘elegance’ is what interests such people, then this blog really isn’t the place for them. A dynamic, spirited style narrative- which is what the Susie Styles section has turned out to be- is much better for us to look at than the pages in Vogue that dictate what’s ‘in’ and ‘out’. At twenty-four (at any age, really) no one needs to stick to a template on How To Dress.
Wow.
CM is a prick.
I love how she’s giving you advice as if you asked for it AND as if she’s in a position to give you it!
Susie, we love you, keep blogging!
xx
Seeing that the scathing comment was originally criticism aimed at Susie, I think it has spun out and is now a pretty engaging read on personal style. Drusilla’s comment on how both Audrey and Katherine Hepburn may be style icons on elegance now, but were in fact on the forefront of fashion is truly a paradigm shift for me, because that was how I saw them – old-school elegance rather than trendsetters.
Reading Susie is a daily habit for me, and I admire her for being completely out of the box and having a fashion perspective entirely different from all fashion bloggers put together.
Her posts and outfit pictures, fast and furious as they come, changes my own perspective on outfits. Why should we confine ourselves to that of a perfectly made up face and manicured nails? If that was the perfect way to dress and everyone adheres to that, then fashion becomes uniform and why, elegance will just be a second skin.
About CM’s comment on how ‘radical’ and ‘elegant’ go hand in hand – yes it does, doesn’t it? Probably, the only thing in common is how an elegant person and a radical are both confident in their choice of clothing. IMO, Susie definitely exudes a sense of quiet confidence about her outfits, which is elegance in itself.
Susie, I look forward to meeting you one day even though we are continents apart, and telling you in person how much I like your style.
Wow, only just saw all this after not reading for a few days. I fear I’m probably echoing and reinforcing everyone else who has replied here, but what the hell!
Like everyone else here, I would like to thank you Susie. Like Fiona said, your blog really does inspire me to take more risks with the way I dress too. Reinforcing what you said in another post Re. the Elle and Vogue shoots this month; surely fashion must have some element of creativity and a dreamlike quality too, otherwise we run the risk of becoming predictable and boring.
Elegance can be so often confused with sterility, when in fact, all it really is, is an attitude within itself.
To me, there is nothing more sterile, boring and uncreative than being overdone, overpolished and ‘restrained’. Isn’t fashion about pushing boundaries, creating something new, and well, dreaming?!
Big respect to Susie for not making the photos she uploads over-edited and over-made-up, and not striving towards something that would lessen her convictions in regard to how she looks. It would be all to easy to slip into that trap and for her blog to become boring and generic.
NB. Some people have natural beauty and don’t have the somewhat obsessive/dubious reliance upon a makeup counter and fashion mag beauty ‘bible’…
This wasn’t even supposed to be a rant, so apologies!
I’ve said all I need to say on the matter both here and in my onagono post… but I just wanted to say again, thanks for offering your two cents on what elegance is to you and for understanding that I’m not perfectly styled and never will be.
Stephie: Let’s hope for that meeting one day!
I can just imagine the kinda stereotypical person CM is…the kind of girl that gives you the ‘once-over’ when they meet you, and you know they don’t like how you look. Those people bore me…in fact her comment bored me. i had to skim the end, because why on earth would i want to read an attack on a fashion blogger who blogs about new ways of wearing things by some dull bitch who has nothing better to do (in the few minutes a day that she’s not checking her make-up in the mirror) than to slam other people as if she has the authority to do so. Sounds to me like that person is so insecure that she has to make fun of other people just because they are so naturally beautiful, like Susie, that they in fact don’t need to wear full-on make-up and do their hair. I only wear make-up when i feel like it because i know i don’t need it everyday. But don’t worry CM, i understand..it must be horrible to have to dress immaculately everyday, and pile on the make-up just to distract everybody from your nasty personality. I hope one day CM learns about true elegance…which can’t be learnt and maybe she should learn a bit of class too, because her post certainly wasn’t. Because as a reader of your post CM, i can tell you, you certainly seem far tackier that lovely Susie.
Hello, Ms Style Bubble.
(I don’t read your blog as often as I would like to, as a daily English reading would be a bit frustrating to me _my English is really not that good)
I simply wanted to precise that, living in a country where people _and especially women_ tend to look for √©l√©gance despite the lack of originality it can imply, I find it rather boring. Maybe you’re not looking for it, but to my eyes you’ve got it, because every time I visit your blog, I am surprised and amazed by how great you look with those clothes I would not even have the idea they could exist. El√©gance may be found in bodies, faces, talks, voices or fabrics, but I really think yours is in your mind, because I tend to personally think that openness, ‘audace’ and even humour are the most proper proofs (or is it a trick of our French th√®se-antith√®se-synth√®se??) of √©l√©gance.
I apologize for my possibly dysfunctional English.
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That was really great. I love all the clothes that was designed by Alber Elbaz. He is a good inspiration of a designer.
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