EDITO RIAL · 2019. 8. 5. · ELEGANCE N ° 42 p. 8 p.34 p. 40 p. 58 p. 62 p. 86 p. 94 p. 102 p. 112 p. 76 Editorial 4 // Portfolio 8 // On the Virtue of Elegance 34 // Dandies Past

4 // ELEGANCE / NUMBER 42

Distinctness or imitation? Understatement or extravagance? Playing with one’s appearance or remaining authentic? Elegance is at once movement, style and spirit, and the essence it seeks to express transcends the trends of the moment. As Hubert de Givenchy once said, “Jeanne Toussaint was not fashionable, she was elegant.”

Elegance clearly has an aesthetic quality but also a moral and intellectual one. However, it can become dangerous when it defies conventions. Too much distinctiveness arouses anger.

They say it is universal and timeless yet is it not a touch cultural and changeable? Time blurs certain references, certain frontiers. Perceptions shift, appreciation changes. A garment, a type of behavior or certain gestures are judged differently in different times and contexts. We should relativize.

Elegance is everywhere. It’s in the tiniest detail created by nature and man; it’s in the heart of a landscape, in a feather or a leaf, in a piece of haute couture, fine jewelry or an exceptional timepiece. Yet at the same time it remains, for some of us, out of reach like some inaccessible grail. We endlessly admire the innate poise of a large feline, the naturally graceful way a woman holds her head; we envy the break of the dandy’s trousers and his impeccable mustache unfazed by rain or shine.

If elegance is equilibrium, then are not those endowed with it virtuosos of balance?

ART AND CULTURE

Cultural Committee ChairmanValéry Giscard d’Estaing

Cultural CommitteeFranco CologniArielle DombasleHugues GallDaniela GiussaniGuillaume PictetFranceline PratAgatha Ruiz de la PradaOliva SalviatiPatrizia Sandretto Re RebaudengoCyrille VigneronThe Duke of WellingtonXiaozhou Taillandier Xing

RIGHT PAGE Denis Darzacq, Yohji Yamamoto fashion show, 1997.

EDITO RIAL

PIERRE RAINERO

ELEGANCE N° 42

p. 8 p. 34

p. 40

p. 58p. 62

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p. 94

p. 102

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Editorial 4 // Portfolio 8 // On the Virtue of Elegance 34 // Dandies Past and Present 40 // The Touch of Beauty 48 // Design: Form and Function 58 // An Expressive Singularity 62 // The Rhythm of Bodies, the Melody of Drapery 68 // For Men Only 76 // Iris van Herpen: A Perfect Balance 86 // Elsie de Wolfe: High Priestess of Taste 94 // Through the Photographer’s Eye 102 // On and Off-Screen Elegance 112

p. 68

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ELEGANCE: SOME ARE BORN WITH IT, OTHERS HAVE TO WORK AT IT. ELEGANCE IS HARMONY AND PURITY, RIGHTNESS AND DISCRETION,

LIGHTNESS OF TOUCH AND EASE OF MANNER. IT IS TIMELESS AND TRANSCENDS FASHION. IT IS OFTEN OBSERVED WHEN OUT AND

ABOUT IN NATURE BUT IT’S ALSO SEEN IN MANMADE CREATIONS; ONE ADMIRES IT IN THE HANDSOME LINES OF AN AUTOMOBILE,

IN THE MOVEMENTS OF A SRI LANKAN STILT FISHERMAN OR IN A GEISHA’S HAIRSTYLE.

portfolio

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32 // ELEGANCE / NUMBER 42 33 // ELEGANCE / NUMBER 42portfolio

> In Columbus, Ohio, Topiary Park is the astonishing backdrop for a freshly trimmed and fluffed poodle in a lion-like pose. Set to compete in one of those famous American dog shows, the pooch prances proudly amid the park’s 54 human figures, eight boats, ape and cat fashioned from branches and leaves that are inspired by the Georges Seurat painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. A curious encounter between two arts: canine grooming and topiary.

> Perfectly fitting dresses, sumptuous jewels, doe-like eyes and highlighted lips: women excel in the art of finery. When a world famous American photographer, a member of the Magnum Photos agency since 1986, met an Emirati designer with a strong personality, the results went beyond refinement to give an impression of ascension and power: Steve McCurry and Abeer Al Suwaidi are all alone, or nearly, at Fairmont the Palm, Dubai.

> The panther, a noble feline with an enchantingly agile and powerful silhouette, is the perfect embodiment of elegance. Its spotted fur, its eyes, its haughty gait and the languid pose of its body at rest make it eminently seductive. Admired by painters, sculptors and photographers, it has even been transformed into jewelry, becoming a Cartier icon and a favorite animal of the Maison’s clients.

> Escaping the humdrum of life, the traveler is charmed by all things foreign. Actions and tasks that may appear quotidian for those performing them become graceful dances when you are discovering a country, a custom or a trade. At Weligama, in Sri Lanka, stilt fishermen spend hours perched on wooden poles tirelessly repeating the same choreography much to the delight of tourists and photojournalists.

> What might these gentlemen in frock coats,

depicted here by Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux in 1839 after a gouache by Louis Carrogis Carmontelle from 1770, be discussing? It could be anything: the layout of the new gardens at Saint-Cloud or maybe their admiration for the charming demoiselles walking along the paths below. In any case, these men in the country attire of the House of Orléans are certainly taking a break from protocol: the Marquis de Périgny has his arm around the waist of the Chevalier de Saint-Mars, and the Baron de Tourempré is playing with a dog.

> Whether left to its own devices or patiently sculpted by human hands, nature is a creator of elegant forms. At the Château de Hautefort in Dordogne, the French-style gardens and English-style park of this old medieval castle are among the finest examples of landscaping in Périgord. Harmoniously integrated with the surrounding landscape, the building and its grounds are a pleasure to explore.

> An autodidact and key figure in 20th-century architecture, the work of Luis Barragán is deeply rooted in his childhood. Born in Guadalajara, he spent part of it on the family ranch, where he was steeped in popular traditions, wide-open spaces, bright colors, shadow and light, and the clear language of forms and materials. These elements were ingeniously integrated into his buildings, as here in the Cuadra San Cristóbal estate built in 1964-69 in Mexico City.

> Cartier is a creator of precious objects for elegant women. This powder compact from the early 1930s, made in the London ateliers, has a style and formal purity reminiscent of early modern architecture. The black curves of the lacquered compact subtly contrast with the lines of coral along the hinge and clasp. On the outside, it’s a controlled interplay of matte and shininess; inside, the mirror offers the lady a last glimpse of her powdered cheeks.

> Military uniforms are attractive. And when the wearer himself is good-looking, many a lady may be of the mind to surrender. Perhaps they’ll yield to these cadets from the Belgian Royal Military School, whose charming uniforms have all the trappings of power. Back straight, head up, an unflinching gaze and impeccably attired, military grooming is an art that aims to impress.

> “The Concours d’Élégance en Automobile

combines the presentation of a team that must always include a woman—the man plays an ancillary role, that of driver—and a car whose lines are undeniably elegant.” This definition, formulated by the Fédération Française des Véhicules d’Époque, France’s vintage car society, has remained unchanged since the first competitions of the 1920s. This national tradition of uniting famous couturiers and classic automakers in a single event has been emulated worldwide. In 2008, the Maison Cartier created a similar event in Mumbai, India: Cartier Travel with Style, now an annual classic.

> They are dignified, proud and dressed to the nines. They love fashion and preen in their colorful outfits. Photographed in 1973–74 by Ambroise Ngaimoko and in the 2000s by Héctor Mediavilla, these men are sapeurs, as members of Congo’s Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (SAPE) are known. Inspired by Western tailoring and English dandyism, the SAPE was founded in Brazzaville in the 1920s and continues today with an authentic joie de vivre spiced with a touch of provocation.

< Her face painted white, lips red and nape exposed, a geisha stands in her silk kimono. Her life, dedicated to the perfection of Japanese traditional arts, is all delicacy and refinement. Music, dance, poetry, literature and the tea ceremony, all studied with her “sisters” and long-standing companions, fill her days. More than a simple escort, she is an accomplished, admired and envied artist.


On the Virtue

of EleganceIn its most fundamental sense, elegance is a person’s unique manner of occupying space and time, of setting him or herself apart from the rest of the world, of “appearing,” as evoked in the “À une passante” poem by Charles Baudelaire: “A woman passed, lifting and swinging / With a pompous gesture the ornamental hem of her garment.”

by Charles Pépin


legance is principally about movement; or, to put it another way, movement and freedom. Look at Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. It is impossible to conceive of elegance as simply conforming to norms of good taste; it is impossible to attain elegance simply by following. You have to set yourself apart from the rest of the world and, at the same time, from social conventions—conventions which you need to have assimilated before seeking freedom from them.

But if elegance is only that then it could be mistaken for “cutting a fine figure,” in other words, for style. Elegance is style with the addition of a “moral” component. A “bad guy” can have style and it is possible to behave outrageously while still cutting a fine figure. Elegance is much more than style: it is both aesthetic and moral. Being elegant is to conduct oneself with grace, be it walking down the street or interacting with others. A move, or way of moving, can be termed “elegant.” The same can be said of conduct. Being elegant is moving with style and conducting oneself gracefully, as if one didn’t go without the other, as if the civilized human animal can only aspire to Beauty in aspiring simultaneously to good. As if elegance is inconceivable without its moral component. It is likely this moral component that gives style that subtle quality that transforms it into elegance. But it’s a fine line: elegance begins with style.

There are some magnificent pages in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on style: to have style is to appear in a manner that is your very own. Have you noticed that style can be spotted a long way off? In a crowded street, suddenly, style comes into view. You can’t yet make out the elegant man or woman’s facial features; you can’t yet tell exactly how he or she is dressed; yet the fact that the person has style is indisputable. What is it then that you have seen? Is it the elegance of the person’s style, which is the mark of uniqueness in search of itself? Elegance is always instantly conveyed. And that is why nudity can also be elegant, not when it is exposed crudely but in the moment of its unveiling, in the very motion of its appearing.

Elegance breeds a desire for elegance. There is an exemplarity in elegance: another person’s elegance cannot be copied but it can at least inspire. Our daily life is full of constraints and mediocrity is a constant temptation. Remaining elegant is often a challenge. That is why a mere encounter with elegance can set us free, reminding us that elegance is attainable. This is the fundamentally moral virtue of admiration: we admire to nourish ourselves, to absorb the idea that we, too, might become admirable. Someone who persists in elegance in the face of adversity, someone who continues to conduct themselves with elegance while those around them have given up is something that speaks louder than words. Baudelaire’s passer-by has that kind of effect on the poet.

“A gleam... then night! O fleeting beautyYour glance has given me sudden rebirthShall I see you again only in eternity?”

To encounter her so elegant, so beautiful, gives him a “sudden rebirth,” it gives him the desire to recapture some of his own force and beauty. Elegance is a proposition, as if the other’s uniqueness were a bridge extended toward mine, an invitation. It shows, once again, that elegance cannot be merely of a social order: strict compliance with social conventions would hinder this communication between “uniquenesses,” those mutually inspired “elegances.” Elegance is the personal and subjective reappropriation of a social code: it plays with it in the double sense of playful activity and a movement back and forth.

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PRECEDING DOUBLE PAGE Cricket umpire in position behind the wicket. ABOVE Two young amateur boxers listening to the referee giving them instructions before the fight.FOLLOWING DOUBLE PAGE The London 2012 Olympic Games.

virtuous. Our concern for beauty channels us toward good; Plato analyzed this movement, this upward dynamic in the Symposium: we are drawn to beautiful forms so that we might then seek to conduct ourselves with grace. The aesthetic dimension of elegance is a stepping stone toward its truly moral dimension. At its root, and from the start, our attraction to beauty is an attraction to good. We don’t have to follow Plato to that point; we can continue to conceive of an attraction to beauty that has nothing to do with morality. There is no doubt that beauty often goes beyond mere good and evil. But the Platonic vision helps us to view elegance as an ideal for living. We can seek out beauty of form and grace of gesture in order to be both a beautiful person and have style.

This understanding of elegance always implies at least the possibility of moral behavior. See, for example, Robert de Niro in Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York. He behaves badly toward Liza Minnelli. And yet his every step, every shoulder shrug, every look is achingly elegant. What does this elegance convey to us? That he could behave better, or could have behaved better or regrets not having behaved better? In short, it’s that he is a moral person. He’s neither perfect nor beyond reproach.He’s a man who thinks, who doubts, who questions the notions of good and evil. His elegance is inextricably linked to his questioning and to his conscience. Without these, there’d only be style. ■

But this playful dimension doesn’t make elegance superficial. There is nothing more essential than seeking to invent oneself in the play of appearances. Elegance is an appearance: the appearance of my truth that is in search of itself, of my truth that is looking for itself in other people’s eyes. Merleau-Ponty, who pondered the enigma of style, came up with the idea that if we are able to recognize the style of a friend, in the street or at a distance, it is because his truth is revealed in his appearance. His walk, or his manner of occupying space, speaks to his uniqueness. To attach importance to elegance is to remember that our human depth also embraces our appearance. Elegance is the outward apparition of my depth within my appearance. Speaking of style, Victor Hugo wrote: “The form is the content that rises to the surface.” We human animals have been attached to symbolism and the beauty of forms since we lived in caves. We are “superficial in our profundity,” as Nietzsche put it so well; for us, elegance is anything but superficial. Elegance speaks of my concern to invent myself in the eyes of the other, a concern that is shared by the other. Elegance is directed simultaneously at myself and at others. I endeavor to conduct myself with elegance in faithfulness to myself but at the same time I address this conduct to others. Being elegant always shows that elegance is possible. A “graceful gesture” is a gesture that is not only formally elegant but morally

Dandies Past and Present by Pierre Jouan

Elegance is a subtle notion and subject to the vagaries of time. Each person or group interprets it in their own way, respecting the norm to a greater or lesser degree. From the dandies of yesteryear to today’s fancy dressers, from the aristocratic tradition to globalized society, different codes of elegance are at play.


riginally, no doubt about it, the dandy was an idle aristocrat. In 18th-century English society, one was generally content to conform to one’s rank and disinclined to leave it. High society was governed by strict social conventions, rules and customs. In short, a recipe for boredom. The dandy sought to break with the monotonous triviality of his everyday life by cultivating a form of separation, namely that of the individual from the group or circle. Yet he was no revolutionary as his very distinction presupposed an established order. The art of dandyism was to assert one’s singularity while moving within the confines of propriety and never to overstep those boundaries for fear of marginalization. “Eccentricity is unbridled, wild and blind. . . . Dandyism on the contrary, while still respecting the conventionalities, plays with them,” is how Barbey d’Aurevilly put it. It is like walking a tightrope, adopting a deft pose between originality and the norm, between audacity and reason.

This form of elegance was therefore a matter of balance. Sidestepping the conformism, which dictated that everyone should dress appropriately but without originality, the dandy added something different to his attire—a new cut, an unusual color—without ever losing his sense of moderation; for if he deviated too far from the norm, one would only perceive his excesses, not his taste, and the effect would be lost. In his book about Beau Brummell, the epitome of the English dandy, Barbey says that Brummell “left scarlet to savages,” adding that “to be well turned out, you must not be noticed.”

In a similar vein, Baudelaire observed that dandyism is not, “as many thoughtless people

seem to believe, an immoderate taste for the toilet and material elegance”; when one was truly “in love with distinction above all things, the perfection of his toilet will consist in absolute simplicity.” One had to avoid being extravagant, extrovert or conspicuous, for elegance went hand in hand with a certain restraint, a composure of philosophical origin that detested scandal and publicity.

The elegant young man was drawn to futility in a world stifled by gravity: to take meticulous care with the fold of a tie or the studiously negligent fall of a scarf was a way of saying that nothing really mattered, that men’s great ideas were hollow and that paying fussy attention to one’s appearance was no less deep than a speech full of gravitas on politics or morality. In a world that was all appearance and no substance, one had to be naive to see a depth in things; the dandy explored the surface, offering a kind of superior profundity. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” said Oscar Wilde, with his characteristic sense of paradox.

From idle aristocrat to urban tribeBut this élégant, as depicted by Baudelaire and Proust, served his time. In the collective consciousness he became a heroic figure of inspiration for the masses, consumed by that inextricable paradox: if everyone was a dandy, then no one was.

Elegance, as a means to create a certain effect, took on a different meaning. Among the members of a specific group or culture, it became codified, acting as a social marker to the detriment, sometimes, of its intrinsic simplicity.

O

PAGE 40 John Singer Sargent, portrait of Carolus-Duran, French painter (detail), 1879.PAGE 41 Rose Callahan, portrait of Raymond Chu, actor and dandy, photographed in Chinatown, New York, 2010.ABOVE Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Portrait of the Count Pierre de Quinsonas, circa 1913.



dress style as a discreet display of protest against injustice—what Peter Meaden, manager of the rock group The Who, summed up in his famous words: “Clean living under difficult circumstances.” It was a principle that reflected the dignity of the proletarian in the face of oppression, and his silent glee at symbolically winning the class struggle when, at every encounter with his social superior, he was aware of being the more elegant of the two. His overall appearance was irreproachable and yet the devil was in the details since his impertinence was there for all to see.

Recent decades have seen the working classes borrow bourgeois-style elegance in countless ways, in part mimicry, in part provocation. In the Republic of Congo, the urban movement La SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes) worships prestige brands and haute couture; while in the West, young people from the working-class suburbs favor luxury sportswear. Dressing with style, and not lacking touches of extravagance, is a way to identify with a group and to be identifiable.

But if elegance can be bought, if it is becoming standardized, does it not cease to be elegant? If we are to distinguish ourselves from our peers should we not return to a form of simplicity? It is no small irony that the “no look” concept, using ordinary clothes and secondhand or recycled pieces, should have become the last word in elegance. Unbranded clothing, retro shoes and banal beanies any time of year are the distinctive signs of a young generation that is uncomfortable with mass consumption. And this purely sartorial rebellion has created its own cliché: the hipster, a person who is totally modern with a deceptively rustic exterior. Behind that repellent term it is still the neighbor being referred to, mired as he is in contradictions: his simplicity belies his sophistication, and his revolt is a submission to global culture.

Perhaps there is too much artifice in the elegance of the hipster when, in essence, it should be self-evident, almost natural. Wanting to be elegant in a conspicuous manner points to not having what it takes. Elegance is not something you can put your finger on; it has a je ne sais quoi that cannot be put neatly into words. And that is probably why elegant men tend to be as attractive as they are irritating since all we can really say about them is that we never really know how they do it.

itness the zazous of the 1940s in France, whose passion for jazz music and nightlife engendered a kind of sartorial hyperbole: excessively high shirt collars, inordinately long jackets, hair always curled and an umbrella whatever the weather! It might have been a passing fad had it not taken on a new meaning during World War II, when the zazous’ frivolous dress style became a discreet but effective way for young people to thumb their nose at the Occupation; their bravado was reflected, for example, in the absurdly wide pants they wore at a time when fabric was strictly rationed. Elegance, even when bizarre, had become a token of recognition.

A mark of panache, a sign of revolt against the established order, in the 1960s the British mods turned elegance into a class issue. Originally they were a group of style-conscious modern jazz lovers who donned close-fitting suits to pose in London’s trendy districts, a Jean-Paul Sartre book tucked under their arm. But the phenomenon caught on and the mod style became popular worldwide: a suit (tailor-made and in an unlikely color), a three-button jacket (the last one always undone), a turtleneck or shirt (with a button-down collar, always buttoned), cuffed pants (slightly too short), suede boots and a French crop haircut. It was an immutably spruce look that stated their affiliation to a group.

The mods were proud to belong to the working class and their elegance was a reinterpretation of upper-class conventions. Their look was a form of political insolence, a private rebellion. Unable to overthrow the world from their humble position, the mods used their

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PAGE 44 Rose Callahan, Mickael François Loir, designer at Le Loir en Papillon - Paris, photographed in Paris, 2011. PAGE 45 Henri-Lucien Doucet, Portrait of Robert, Count of Montesquiou-Fézensac, critic and poet (detail), 1879. RIGHT PAGE Rose Callahan, Sven Raphael Schneider, founder and editor-in-chief of Gentleman’s Gazette, photographed in New York, 2012; Antonio de La Gandara, Portrait of Jean Lorrain, writer and journalist (detail), 1898.


The Touch of Beauty

The elegance of dressing in precious jewelry, daringly donning a sensuality that enables beauty to flourish. High jewelry and femininity form an inseparable, potent duo,

made mutually resonant in a sublime union of grace and glamour. Cartier’s creations as seen by an artist.

Drawings and monotypes by Aurore de La MorinerieBROOCH — white gold, one 46.12-carat cushion-shaped

purple tourmaline, plique-à-jour enamel, onyx, brilliant-cut diamonds.

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The fatal year: 1789. Dispatched to the court at Versailles, the fledgling ambassador Thomas Jefferson returned to the newly born United States of America amid the clangor of gunfire and the collapse of old worlds. The future president had spent just five years at the court of Louis XVI. Yet those months of marvels and worldliness permitted him to bring back across the Atlantic two visions that were destined to forever change the Western concept of elegance: the perfect proportions of Palladian architecture, then a dominant trend in France thanks to English influence; and the exciting magnificence of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.

Deeply impressed with the sovereign’s exquisite sense of style, Thomas Jefferson wrote that she was the perfect representation of everything that art, good taste and wealth allowed one to obtain. At the same time, he was so intimately subjugated to the formal purity of Palladian classicism that the future president laid the foundation for an original declination of elegance that would come to characterize not only the University of Virginia, an authentic “small city” inspired by Vicentine architecture, but Washington itself.

Sumptuousness and sobriety, splendor and rigor, a spasmodic search for the ephemeral, surprising, iconic effects through a timeless hieratic key, these apparently contrasting elements perfectly identify the creative dissonance that would determine the very concept of elegance, thus bridging not only the ancien régime and modernity but also Europe and America as well as aristocracy and democracy to boot.

Through historical comprehension of this generative dialogue we can understand why the “taste” that Montesquieu, in his entry for the Encyclopédie, declared unfailingly connected with a “certain something” derived of aristocratic influence was then transformed into a series of codes, sensations and rules that were transversal to different worlds, classes and disciplines. Because while it’s true that elegance is innate, and that being elegant is undoubtedly more an attitude (or a gesture) than an object, it is equally true that from the 1700s onward a certain snobbism among members of court was no longer viewed as an expression of refinement but rather associated with the terrible parvenu: an individual who represents the exact opposite of the elegant man, just as vulgarity (as Coco Chanel would later affirm) represents the precise opposite of luxury.

It was clear times had changed when in 1870 another American, Henry James, who in The Nation magazine wrote of the kaleidoscopic and sumptuous clothing worn by the ladies of Saratoga, spoke probably for the first time ever of a “democratization of elegance.” Was it somehow a reference to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which the aristocratic had written in 1835 and which was a reflection on the way to best protect personal liberty in a world racing toward an equality of living conditions? Or was it the response that history was supplying another Frenchman, Honoré de Balzac, and his concept of an elegance that “did not consist so much in clothing, as in the way it was worn”? His elegant life, as it was described in his famous essay from 1830, seemed, in the eyes of Tocqueville five years later, not only profoundly classist but even a bit boring.

It comes back to the fact that elegance was and is an expression of freedom, expressiveness and naturalness. This new yearning for the rationalization of beauty, this attitude of simplicity and proportion that the Pre-Raphaelites would connect with the style that preceded the migration of Urbanites to Rome soon found a sanctification at London’s 1851 Universal Expo that was destined to endure. Reporting to the king of Sardinia on the masterworks of modern industry and craftsmanship on display at the Crystal Palace, Conte Sermattej anticipated one of the key points of the culturally aware planning typical of design: the perfect union of form and function—in other words, a search for beauty that is no obstacle to the object’s fruition. “The steel is clear and of extremely beautiful

Design: Form and Function by Alberto Cavalli

“ Elegance in language is like luxury in society. Neither one nor the other can exist within the principles of the weak but only when the weak are made cultured, capable experts.”FRANCESCO ANTONIO ASTORE, La filosofia dell’eloquenza, o sia L’eloquenza della ragione.


quality, a work of true perfection, but the design could not be more baroque,” wrote the Savoy aristocrat, commenting on a particularly bold set of tableware. “What fingers will ever make use of those scissors, elaborated and tormented in such a way that they’ve been rendered practically impossible to use? And what mouth will avail itself of that trident-shaped fork, which seems more than anything else ready to lacerate any tongue that attempts to caress it?”

If even the aristocrats stigmatize pomp and excess, invoking an elegance carved out around function, it is clear that the dialogue between the different visions entertained by Thomas Jefferson had carried out their revolution: bringing beauty into everyday life, extending its power to useful objects but avoiding that affectation which effectively is, as Baldassare Castiglioni emphasized in his admirable text Il Cortigiano (The Book of the Courtier), the farthest thing imaginable from true elegance. In other words, beauty and elegance are aesthetically evolved and functionally plausible.

The establishment of an increasingly close dialogue between craftsman and industry, art and production, fashion and the avant-garde led to a series of revolutions in the very concept of elegance that was fatally destined to bring about an entirely contemporary idea of design. While in Europe Art Nouveau and later Art Deco led to the rigors of the Bauhaus, in America the desire for beautiful forms led to the legendary model of mass production. One of the protagonists of this search for beauty, at once aesthetic and formal, was undoubtedly Raymond Loewy, who dominated American design for over forty years.

After all, what could be less aristocratic than a locomotive? And at the same time, what could be more elite than an automobile? Loewy, with his advanced, aerodynamic and aesthetically sober solutions, transferred Le Corbusier’s intuitions to objects used in everyday life, to symbols of progress, to icons of contemporary existence that were right under everyone’s noses. It trained many an eye to appreciate a beauty and style no longer confined to the couture salons. It became the flame and fuel for a new desire, setting alongside the elegance of the mind—“the only real elegance,” according to legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland—an accessible, diffuse and even didactic elegance of form, didactic in the sense that it led to an experimentation of new solutions. Indeed, who would have imagined that the sumptuous rooms of the Élysée Palace, at the time occupied by the exquisite Madame de Pompadour, would one day house Pierre Paulin’s chairs? Who could have imagined a French president seated on pieces by the creator of the Orange Slice Chair, the 560 (Mushroom) Chair and the Tongue Chair?

To tell the truth, Yves Saint Laurent could have easily imagined it. He was the first one to recognize that the true “chic” originated on the Rive Gauche within artistically evolved environments that were therefore disconnected from the old “elegant life” of Balzac. Saint Laurent also agreed with Vreeland that “elegance is refusal,” a refusal of the old, the ugly, the useless.

Today, it has even become banal to recognize that the democratization of luxury “has been the single most important marketing phenomenon of modern times,” as author James B. Twitchell has affirmed. It is less banal to reflect on the fact that this diffusion of luxury has also led to a new concept of elegance: when the object is accessible to (almost) everyone, the individual reemerges to make a difference. Loewy, for example, “transformed the world of those objects among which millions of people conduct their daily lives.” It is hard to deny the role of the object in the evolution of the individual or the collective consciousness, or the fact that elegance is, once again, a fine balance between form and function.

This intuition is joined by another attribute, one that Jefferson had already glimpsed, de Tocqueville hypothesized and Saint Laurent celebrated: freedom. In ancient Greece, the beauty of the agora taught citizens of the polis a sense of justice. Beauty seems fragmented, dispersed, hidden away like a Minotaur lost in a labyrinth. What remains is elegance, reminding us that justice and beauty always walk hand in hand. There is the simplicity and spontaneity of gesture, a pureness of line and the knowledge that a human’s touch can transform material into desire. It evokes an elegance that is everything art and good taste can—and must—create. ■

PAGE 58 The Rotunda at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, completed in 1826. The university was founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, author of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and third president of the United States (1801–1809). He designed the layout of the campus like an academic village. The Rotunda was inspired by Rome’s Pantheon, while the other buildings in the neoclassical style fuse functionalism with symbolism. They reflect Jefferson’s ideals for the new American republic. RIGHT Armchair by French designer Pierre Paulin, 1959. Part of the famous 560 series, it is nicknamed the Mushroom Chair. Paulin is said to have been inspired by the shapely forms of women sheathed in swimsuits. He covered his chair entirely in stretch fabric for a perfectly smooth effect. This design was one of his favorites.

An Expressive Singularity by Bertrand Prévost

Elegance is an obsession for many people; for animals, not at all. A giraffe would never glance appreciatively at its own reflection while passing in front of a mirror, but women would admire the

animal’s graceful gait. A chicken would not enter a beauty contest of its own volition, but people may make that choice for it.

The elegance of animals is a profoundly human construction.


Since the dawn of humanity, the animal realm has lent its materials and forms—feathers, fur, leather, bone and scales—to human fashions, from the crudest to the most elegant. Simply consider how our sartorial vocabulary continues to bear this zoological imprint, in its wasp waists and swallowtails, herringbone and houndstooth, boas and aigrettes. While it is easy to visualize this borrowing by humans, it is more difficult to contemplate animal elegance on its own or at least other than through metaphors attributing human aesthetic characteristics to animals. Perhaps the whole question lies herein: how can we describe the elegance of animals without resorting to vague poetic expressions or simple metaphor? How can we envision the sovereignty—the state of existing for one’s

own sake—of these stripes and spots, bright and iridescent colors, crests and tails? We may need to reflect simultaneously on the wealth and variation of these features and their extreme precision within a given specimen. Haphazard colors are unknown to the animal world, even on the most flamboyant parrot. So how do we explain all of these qualities on their own without reducing them to a design of nature, or worse, the artistic plan of some divine being?

Clearly, to introduce the notion of elegance into the animal realm is to blur the boundary between nature and culture. Could this also imply that our own artistic space is not entirely distinct from nature as we supposed? In reality, these questions have nothing to do with the artistic abilities of animals and it would be quite pointless to evoke well-worn examples of the ingenious craftsmanship of the spider and its web, the beaver and its dam, the bee and its honeycomb or the bowerbird and its nest. The aim is not to see the animal’s form as the result of some artistic design or plan, according to which it produces even its own attire, but to consider the animal’s appearance in all its singularity—its distinctiveness compared to other appearances but also in and of itself, with its sovereign precision and inherent uniqueness (one pattern, one shape, one color, etc.). In place of an objective form having specific traits, animal elegance should be thought of as a deeper form of expression. This elegance would then be a means of perceiving the autonomous expression of living forms.

The life sciences have also examined these questions of aesthetics. Since Darwin’s theory of evolution, we know that the development of a given form is often due to natural and sexual selection processes: for example, feathers serve as protection from the cold and also as adornment for courtship rituals. More recently, scientists have attempted to explicate morphogenesis by unveiling the physical and chemical processes governing the development of forms, including chemical and structural coloration, pattern formation and regular organization. But the specific aspect that these explanations systematically overlook, whether they point to external functions or internal morphogenetic processes, is the supreme distinctiveness—in other words, clarity or precision—that results in this animal having this set of colors or one specimen having green stripes while another has yellow.

Photos by Eric Sander, “Coq & Roll” series, 2011.PRECEDING DOUBLE PAGE Silver-Laced Crested Polish hen. LEFT PAGE Padovana White Frizzle hen.PAGE 67 Padovana Chamois Frizzle bantam hen.


on the same level as metabolism and reproduction. One could say that the Swiss zoologist was not so much concerned with animal forms as with what is inside them to make them expressive, differentiating between “genuine” appearances (for example, the color of a morpho butterfly or the stripes of a tropical fish) and non-genuine appearances (the shape of the heart or the intestines). This is the reason for his focus on the autonomous nature of a designed appearance and an aesthetic dimension independent from organic functions.

Here is probably where elegance enters the equation: to qualify or determine a vaster expressiveness. Whether human or animal, elegance lies perhaps in the ability of a form or color to claim its independence and exist as a pattern in and of itself. Elegance can be described as a form of distinctiveness. Yet while the latter should of course be understood in relation to other forms and patterns it should be considered on its own. What does this imply? That the elegance of a shape or color becomes all the more expressive when it can break free from or rise above its organic substance, detached from any bodily shape. Elegance then becomes synonymous with abstraction, if by this we mean a force abstracting the individual form. One can only concur that animals have mastered the art of producing these strange robes. Once their patches and bands of color no longer denote anatomical divisions, once the rosettes, crests and stripes no longer adorn specific body parts an abstract garb emerges to divest the animal of a part or, in the extreme cases of camouflage, all of its individual corporeity to exist only as a motif. In short, that is the pinnacle of elegance.

iological evolution, thanks in particular to advancements in genetics, adeptly explains the principle of variation of forms but fails to enlighten about the varieties produced. Look at how we choose our own appearance: to wear a striped necktie is not the same as wearing one with polka dots, even if the aesthetic, social and subjective functions of the tie-wearing are identical and the processes by which the stripes or dots are woven into the tie are similar. It’s exactly the same for animals. We can point out that the iridescent blue of the peacock’s neck comes from a structural coloration diffracting only blue light (physical color) and not from a blue pigment (chemical color) but little is said about what it means for the peacock to have a blue neck rather than a red or yellow one, and even less about the stunning composition created by the mix of this blue with the smaller black feathers and white skin of the peacock’s head or of this same blue with the iridescent green of the train. Singularity—in this case, a unique color—gives the elegance of animal forms its expressiveness.

To better understand this expressiveness of living things, we can refer to the brilliant work of Adolf Portmann, a relatively overlooked Swiss zoologist who published in the mid-20th century. Throughout his writings on morphology, in particular his principal work Die Tiergestalt written in 1948 (published in English in 1952 as Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals), Portmann consistently denounced the utilitarianism of the theory of evolution and the mechanism of morphogenetic models. Rather than explain forms based on their function or origin, he sought to understand them through their appearance insofar as appearance can be considered a vital function

BERIC SANDER For sixteen years, in stories and portraits, Eric Sander photographed the American Far West in all its diversity and eccentricity for popular European and American magazines. During his long stay in California, he portrayed the wide-open spaces, new customs and extravagant characters. In 2001, the photographer returned to France to rediscover the beauty and richness of his own country. In the Dordogne he worked on one of his favorite themes: nature and gardens. Since 2010, twelve books have been published on the subject.

On Elegance in Greek SculptureLet the gaze follow from the fold of the elbow to the curve

of the goddess’s or muse’s shoulder, from the knee pressing against the dress to the belly and breast that may be hidden or bare.

Touch with your eyes the muscular torsos and outreaching arms of gods and ephebi. The works of Ancient Greek sculptors have survived

the centuries as beacons of beauty and elegance.

by Alain Pasquier

The Rhythm of Bodies, the Melody of Drapery:


hen the sculptor Henri-Frédéric Iselin was commissioned to create a personification of Elegance for the Grand Foyer of the new Opéra de Paris, built during the Second Empire, he gave it the form of a young woman clad in antique-style drapery. Standing poised, in her left hand she draws a bunch of flowers close to her breast, her right hand slightly raises the tunic that is falling around her feet. There is nothing surprising about such an evocation of antiquity in a gallery of allegories within a building in which architect Charles Garnier so freely cites the forms of Greek and Roman art, especially when we consider that Iselin himself belonged to a generation fired with enthusiasm for the architecture, sculpture and painting of classical antiquity, knowledge of which had advanced considerably thanks to recent archeological discoveries. But this personification means something more: the association of elegance with classical statuary also tells us that Johann Winckelmann’s celebration of the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” that placed Greek sculpture at the pinnacle of the arts still had currency among cultivated minds a hundred years after it was formulated.

This being said, we should recognize that in his effort to represent elegance Iselin fell short of the mark. Although executed à la grecque, his rather bland and staid figure is too much a creature of Second Empire France: the length of right leg revealed by a parting in the garment is more Offenbach Paris than Periclean Athens. It was not until a decade later that the site of the Acropolis yielded up its wonderful korai, those marble statues of young women whose delicate drapery embroiders endless variations on the

fold and fall of fabric. The tunic of the figure in the Opéra is merely a feeble echo of these based on diluted adaptions in Roman sculpture. Those Archaic Greek statues, most of which show how elegance can transcend fashion, are suffused with timeless grace. In Athens as in the ruins of other Helladic cities, they survived the millennia with their freshness fully intact. In the modern era several big names in couture sought to recapture that quality. Created in 1907, the “Delphos” dress by Mariano Fortuny contrived to imitate the slender, dynamic silhouette of the figure surrounded by fabric that trembles in all its folds, as found, for example, in a superb statue from Samos. The evening gowns fashioned by Madeleine Vionnet also played on the sense of transparency that tunics and cloaks offered the gaze as they adjusted and changed with the wearer’s body. And American dancer Isadora Duncan achieved great success with the effects to be had from the manipulation of drapery.

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PRECEDING DOUBLE PAGE Myron, Discobolus, 5th century BC, Classical period (detail).RIGHT PAGE Winged Victory of Samothrace, 2nd century BC, Hellenistic period. FOLLOWING PAGE Kore, 6th century BC, Heraion of Samos; “Delphos” and “Peplos” dresses designed in 1907 and

circa 1930 by the Spanish-born fashion and textile designer Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo; Pensive [Mourning] Athena, 5th century BC, Classical period (detail). PAGE 73 Model posing as a Greek statue. She wears Roman-style pyjamas by the French couturière Madeleine Vionnet, 1931.


Certainly, the ancient Greeks, for whom beauty and goodness shaded into one, generally strove for complete harmony in their artistic creations. This is evident in everything from the majestic temples conceived for their gods to the smallest everyday objects. We need only consider the metamorphosis over the centuries present in their recreations of the fabulous creatures that, early in their history, they borrowed from the East. As these fearsome monsters became Greek, so their forms mutated into a softened composition of perfectly ordered lines in which equilibrium regulated all the proportions, removing any hint of dissonance from their graphic or visual melody. Whether architects, sculptors or potters, Greek artists always chose the path of refinement. That is why the enormous blocks of stone forming the façade of the Parthenon seem so light, and what makes a drinking cup a masterpiece of delicacy.

This relation, as we know, is constantly present in the elaboration of human figures: the representation of the human body must always contain the pulsations of a certain rhythm. This may have undergone changes over the generations but it never ceases to shape the silhouette, carefully ordering the entire construction of the body. Represented standing, men are usually clothed only in their muscles. These handsome youths, their bodies marshaled by exercise, are never imbalanced by the practice of a given sporting discipline. Bone and muscle combine with true felicity. Initially at rest, these athletes were later captured in movements that exclude violence, exalting equilibrium rather than threatening it. The famous bronze Poseidon in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum brandishes his weapon as if performing a choreographic movement that exudes ease yet remains powerful.

As for Myron’s Discobolus, it is not only a discus thrower but also a symbol of reason: there is, in the deployment of this figure in space, a sovereign harmony between fullness and void, an abstract construction that takes from the real only that which makes form “sing.” From another viewpoint, the Borghese Gladiator, a fine example of late Greek sculpture, strikes a posture that is a cross between fencing and

dance, with the multiple taut muscles of his immense body conjoining strength and grace.

Women, in contrast, are always dressed, or at least until the 4th century BC, when the Athenian Praxiteles created the Aphrodite of Cnidus, the first female nude in classical sculpture and a quintessence of beauty whose countless descendants are still with us today. However, these nudes represent only a portion of the art created after this event. Many of these goddesses and mortals are still robed in cloths as subtle in their execution as they are varied in their motifs. In Classical or Hellenistic models, elegance is expressed in the changing but always harmonious relation that artists were able to create between the body and the fabric. The korai, as we have seen, lend their form to the endlessly renewed play of folds, in which the imitation of reality yields to the desire for ornament, an effect that was surely furthered by decorative painting. But the surface of these materials grows more moderate at the end of the Archaic period; bodies are draped more simply, with large smoothed areas over the bosom and a row of long deep folds hanging down vertically. This is the age of the peplos, a thicker garment of which there were several varieties, including the one worn by the Pensive [Mourning] Athena. The Parthenon frieze assembles female figures dressed in the peplos whose noble posture perfectly captures that simple and natural grace in which we generally recognize the definition of elegance.

There could be no better demonstration of the different colors refracted by the prism of elegance in the world of Greek sculpture than the figures of Victory and Nike. The allegory itself has moral elegance, an elegance that, distancing the tedious spectacle of the bound and vanquished, chooses the graceful image of a beautiful winged young woman flying fluidly through the skies to announce triumph. The Nike of Delos, with its radiant smile, prettily stylizes swift movement, while the Nike of Paros says everything with almost nothing: elevation, suspension in the air, lightness. As for the Winged Victory of Samothrace, it converts the howling of the storm into harmonious chords.

LEFT PAGE Poseidon, 5th century BC, Classical period (detail).


Cartier, the watchmaker of forms. A rectangle for the Tank watch, a parentheses for the Tortue watch, taut curves for the Clé de Cartier watch. Each timepiece embodies the same ideal of purity. Their lines seek balance,

modeling a masculine elegance that is perfect for every occasion.photographs by Eric Sauvage styling by Nicolas Guillon

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CURVES OR CORNERS? STRAIGHT OR CONVEX LINES? The Drive de Cartier wristwatch plays on paradoxes, harmoniously uniting circle and square.

The sleek, bold masculine aesthetic of this new timekeeper makes it an instant classic.

DRIVE DE CARTIER WATCH – Manufacture self-winding mechanical movement, caliber 1904 MC, 18K pink gold case.CUFFLINKS – 18K pink gold, cabochon-cut silvered obsidians.

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ABOVE AND RIGHT PAGE CLÉ DE CARTIER WATCH – 40mm, Manufacture self-winding mechanical movement, caliber 1847 MC, 18K pink gold case.

ABOVE BROOCH – yellow gold, pink gold, chalcedony, one natural pearl, diamonds. Cartier Paris for New York, circa 1953.

84 // ELEGANCE / NUMBER 42 85 // ELEGANCE / NUMBER 42LEFT PAGE AND ABOVE CALIBRE DE CARTIER DIVER WATCH

42mm, Manufacture self-winding mechanical movement, caliber 1904 MC, steel case.


IRIS VAN HERPEN:A Perfect Balance

Dutch designer Iris van Herpen turns the conventions of fashion inside out. Reptilian, organic, technologically challenging and impeccably crafted, her creations

confuse and delight. A former assistant of Alexander McQueen, frock-maker and friend to Lady Gaga, Daphne Guinness and Björk, Van Herpen has discreetly staked her place

in the select circles of Parisian couture with her modern take on elegance. She herself is as graceful and demure as she is determined.

Interview by Emmanuelle Polle


or you, what is elegance? There is more than one kind of elegance. It would be simplistic to say there is only one model, excluding all others. Elegance is when time, place and the individual all come together. The conjunction of self-knowledge and self-awakening, the conjunction of inside and outside. The more you’re in harmony with yourself, the more elegant you are. The more you try to be someone else, the less you glow. Too often people try to reduce elegance to beauty, whereas for me it’s all a matter of proportion and balance. Two very beautiful women can look perfect in the same garment but one may lose her elegance because of her personality or attitude. It’s because I love these metamorphoses that I do this work.

Your designs play on the spectacular, you have introduced a new way of wearing and looking at clothes. Is dressing a gesture that we do for ourselves or for others? How we dress is very cultural. I would say that in Europe the pleasure of clothes is more a personal pleasure, whereas in Asia part of this pleasure is turned outwards: people dress to please others. My work plays on proportions, which are what fashion is all about. I engage with disciplines and techniques outside the world of fashion as a way of bringing out new ideas. The proportions of the female body are a great source of inspiration, and when you decide to change those proportions that will impact the garment and the body wearing it. A garment needs movement to come to life. Maybe that’s why I enjoy working for dancers so much.

In his memoirs, Christian Dior says that whenever he had to design a collection he would spend a month in his hideaway outside Paris, drawing hundreds of models. Is that how you work?Each designer has their own process. I have noticed that if I start only with drawing I soon feel blocked because drawing remains an intellectual process. It’s in the mind, then it’s in the studio and after that you’re just doing variations on a theme and pretty soon you start to feel you’re repeating yourself. I need my mind to be in equilibrium with my body, and that’s why I’m happier working on dolls.

What kind of dolls? Small or large dolls? That’s what couturières like Jeanne Lanvin and Madeleine Vionnet did in the 1920s. My creations are contemporary but I work in a very traditional way. These are human-size dolls, which are like models but static. I create forms by mixing materials. When I started out in fashion I wanted to do everything by hand—to sew, make patterns. I wanted to control things as much as I could. Only later did I go off and explore other fields like 3D printing, new materials and try collaborations with artists. All these techniques are now in my “toolbox.” They haven’t replaced anything, they’re an addition to my skill set. Everything comes together and finds its place on the same garment.

When I’m modeling on my dolls, it’s like meditation. I work very unconsciously, my mind is elsewhere. These are rare, silent, precious moments. I like to be alone at such times, which isn’t always possible because of things that come up in the studio and as part of everyday work. But when I’m working for other people, dancers for example, I have to include a drawing phase, because I need to adjust and understand another person’s wishes. That’s very different.

FPRECEDING DOUBLE PAGE AND PAGE 90 Biopiracy, haute couture Fall/Winter 2014–2015, handmade dress from green-gray goat suede with ray fish print and black embedded beads.RIGHT PAGE Magnetic Motion, haute couture Spring/Summer 2015, detail of dress handmade in 3D-printed transparent fabric, in collaboration with Philip Beesley; Hacking Infinity, haute couture Fall/Winter 2015–2016, detail of dress, hand-plissé and burned stainless steel mesh; Magnetic Motion, Spring/Summer 2015, detail of “RTW” dress, 3D-printed laser-cut leather texture embedded with laser-cut crystals; Hacking Infinity, Fall/Winter 2015–2016, detail of flexible and translucent 3D-printed “Echo” dress.



When you’re working with dancers, the distance from which you appreciate a costume is not the same as it is for street clothes? Is elegance about finding that right distance? Elegance really is a matter of the distance between the wearer and the beholder. At the opera, this distance is at least twenty meters. It changes the way you think about the garments. But, distance aside, the two approaches, to fashion and ballet costumes, are fundamentally different. A costume must be “super-comfortable” and there can be no exceptions, which is not always the case with some of the spectacular pieces for runway shows. Even if my experience of dance is still fairly limited (I have worked with Dutch choreographer Nanine Linning and with Benjamin Millepied for the New York City Ballet and Opéra de Paris), I am hoping there will be more. Dance is very important to me. I have danced myself and, although I don’t have time for that now, I feel close to dancers. I know about dancers’ fascination with a body that you can see becoming deformed. Take the way a classical dancer holds her foot. The more arched the foot, the more deformed, the more exaggerated the curve, the more years of practice begins to show. For the New York City Ballet I therefore invented a kind of boot that reproduces and exaggerates this curvature of the foot. The dancers loved it.

In your shows it’s clear that the shoe is an element that structures the architecture of the silhouette. You have worked with Japanese designer Noritaka Tatehana. At what stage of the collection’s development did the question of the shoe come into play? I usually spend five months working on a collection and the shoes come into the creative process early on, after about a month. It’s true that they are an important part of this quest for architectural construction. Tatehana and I played on the transfer of equilibrium, getting the equilibrium onto the toes rather than on the heel. This game of ours went all the way to dreaming up a crystal shoe, but of course it was too fragile. So we worked on the illusion of a crystal shoe. For the spring 2016 collection I worked with Finsk, a master of balance. If you look at the silhouette, it seems extreme, a crazy height and a gap, or so it seems, between the sole and the foot. And yet those shoes are like sneakers, ten times more comfortable than a pair of heels!

How do you construct a collection? Do you have a “bank of images” from all around the world? My way of working is very unconscious. It’s like a journey, a mental journey through all the images I collect in my head. I don’t write, I don’t take notes. I’ve never been very interested in language. At school I was always more attracted to mathematics, sequences of figures. Not that I am a scientific type. But I am a great collector of books. I buy them all the time and I go to museums a lot. But I hardly ever take photos, because taking a photo means you lose something of the moment you are living, and I don’t want to lose a thing. ■

PRECEDING PAGE Magnetic Motion, Spring/Summer 2015, transparent 3D-printed strapless “Ice” dress. LEFT Escapism, haute couture Spring/Summer 2011, silver-threaded dress. RIGHT PAGE Voltage, haute couture Spring/Summer 2013, handmade and laser-cut dress, in collaboration with Philip Beesley.

The famous blue rinse that puts the pizzazz into an aging lady’s white locks? One of her inventions, it seems.

The heady Pink Lady cocktail? Her creation, some say. Interior decoration? Many credit her with both professionalizing

and feminizing what was originally a pastime for society gents. Elsie de Wolfe was an unorthodox figure whose taste and refinement made her the go-to

interior decorator for American and European high society.

by Bérengère Gouttefarde

de WolfeElsie

High Priestess of Taste


lsie de Wolfe, “an eccentric with an innate sense of chic,” lived several lives. Ella Anderson de Wolfe was born in New York on December 20, 1865 but became known by the name Elsie de Wolfe. In 1926, aged over sixty, she became Lady Mendl as a result of her surprising marriage to an English diplomat, the press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. Born into the American bourgeoisie, she was an elegant society debutante, an actress and theater producer, a keen sportswoman, a peerless hostess, a nurse for the Red Cross during World War I, a decorator and an organizer of extraordinary soirées. But let’s start at the beginning.

Her father, Stephen de Wolfe, was a doctor of distinguished old North American stock; her Scottish-born mother came from a family of scholars and lawyers who emigrated to Novia Scotia. Elsie grew up in the town of her birth, was privately tutored and attended society events. She got her taste for beauty and luxury from her father. In order to polish her education, the young woman was sent to finishing school in Europe at the age of seventeen. There she not only learned fine deportment but attended the social round of receptions and balls. In 1883 the success of her education was crowned by her presentation at the court of Queen Victoria.

Returning to New York, Elsie had no choice but to work: her father soon died, leaving his family a heritage of heavy debt. Fortunately, she would be helped by two decisive friendships. Shortly before leaving London, she had become the protégée of Mrs. Cora Potter, one of the first American society figures to become an actress. Through her Elsie gained access to the world of theater, first as an amateur and then as a professional actress. It was not long before she met Elisabeth Marbury, a pioneering impresario and also the agent of many foreign writers in the United States. Bessy, as she was known, had a strong personality and a physique to match in contrast with Elsie’s delicacy. But the two women were soon an item, their relationship common knowledge in American high society. The couple moved in together in 1892, buying a house on Irving Place close to the elegant Gramercy Park. Decorated by the young actress, Irving House quickly became a meeting place for artistic and political figures.

The 18th-century style: a revolutionWhen not acting or producing plays, de Wolfe traveled in France with her companion, frequenting the couture houses and luxury jewelers of Paris. At Cartier she acquired emerald jewelry and a tiara set with aquamarines that she wore for one of her productions. A faithful client of the house, both in France and in America, all her life she bought necklaces, brooches, medals, clocks, evening bags and other elegant accessories, including a cantine d’automobile. Dressed in her most resplendent jewelry and fashionable outfits, de Wolfe frequented the aristocratic and artistic elite. During one of her trips to France she was introduced to Robert de Montesquiou, a man of letters, critic and dandy who was also one of the most famous arbiters of taste. Through him, she discovered the decorative arts of the 18th century. This was a revelation. The French style of this period embodied the aesthetic harmony she had long been looking for. In 1897,

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PRECEDING PAGE Portrait of Elsie de Wolfe by Cecil Beaton published in American Vogue in 1930. ABOVE AND RIGHT PAGE Interiors of the Beverly Hills villa belonging to Countess Dorothy di Frasso. Decorated in 1936 by Elsie de Wolfe, the villa was inhabited notably by Marlene Dietrich. In 1947, the pianist, composer and conductor José Iturbi purchased the house and lived there in the original decor until his death in 1980.


BE PRETTY IF YOU CAN,

BE WITTY IF YOU MUST,

BUT BE GRACIOUS

IF IT KILLS YOU.—ELSIE DE WOLFE

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she rid Irving House of its dark tapestries and heavy Victorian furniture and made its interiors light and comfortable—these being new notions in the bourgeois society at the end of the 19th century. The walls were white, beige or pale gray, or hung with Chinoiserie-pattern wallpaper. The furniture was upholstered with bird of paradise chintz. Mirrors expanded the spaces, spreading the daylight. Chaises longues replaced strict armchairs. De Wolfe invented an interior to match her lifestyle, and it stunned the high society guests that she and Marbury received there. Indeed, many of the women asked their hostess for help reimagining their own interiors. De Wolfe obliged, and in the first few years charged nothing for her tips.

Farewell to the boardsTruth be told, de Wolfe was not the greatest of actresses. In fact, critics and audiences found her abominable. And yet her personality, her good manners and her ever more elegant outfits created by Jacques Doucet, Charles Frederick Worth and Jeanne Paquin, as well as her sumptuous jewels, were truly seductive. Theaters filled as New York’s smart set flocked to admire this French-style refinement and discover the latest trends in European fashion, which was the height of chic. The supreme consecration came in 1900 when Harper’s Bazaar named de Wolfe the best-dressed woman on the American arts scene. Still, her career as an actress of modest talent was unsatisfying. Marbury encouraged her to monetize her precious decorating expertise and so in 1905 she became an interior decorator.

De Wolfe started out by modernizing a few private apartments. However, it was her interiors for the Colony Club, the first American club exclusively for women, that really launched her name in 1907. Indeed, such was her success that the Vanderbilts, Anne Morgan (the daughter of banker J.P. Morgan), the industrialist Henry

Clay Frick and the publisher Condé Montrose Nast all gave her the keys to their New York mansions. Now into her forties, Elsie’s acting life was a thing of the past. She had found the profession that would bring her fame and fortune, as decorator to the crême de la crême.

Published in 1913, her book The House in Good Taste was a huge success and became the style bible of a generation. Her crusade against overwrought and over-stuffed eclectic interiors, her conception of simplified space and bright colors and her sense of modernity made a real impression on American taste. Her French connections and friendships with what would become European café society also helped broaden her horizons. In the early 1900s she and Marbury bought and restored the Villa Trianon in Versailles, turning it into a showcase for the French and European public that she hoped to charm. Her close circle included the Duchess of Windsor, whom she advised on the art of receiving and for whom she decorated the Château de la Croë on Cap d’Antibes, which Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor acquired in 1938.

A decade earlier, though, in 1926, Elsie finally had tied the knot. With a man: Sir Charles Mendl. Everyone found Lady Mendl a disconcerting proposition, starting with Elisabeth Marbury, although Marbury still made de Wolfe her sole heir in 1933. And so, in her sixties, de Wolfe had acquired that missing jewel for her crown: a title. With Mendl, she continued to welcome the great and the good and organize sumptuous receptions at Villa Trianon. In 1938 and 1939 she put on two “circus balls” in homage to the spring-summer collection of her friend Elsa Schiaparelli. In their subtle mixture of elegance, lavishness and gaiety, these were like her last testament.

When she passed away in 1950, de Wolfe, who had conquered and professionalized the male-dominated activity of interior decorating, was seen as the high priestess of taste. ■

LEFT PAGE Interior of the villa of Countess Dorothy di Frasso. In 2008, the house was put up for sale and the furniture sold at auction.


THROUGH THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S EYE

The women of the court came first, followed by actresses. Then female models—the muses of couture designers—struck

their first poses in fashion magazines. Revealed through the lenses of the greatest photographers, the model portrayed the feminine ideal.

Just like she does today. by Raphaëlle Stopin


irst fashion icon of the photographic era, the Countess of Castiglione understood quite well that photography, being reproducible by nature and so allowing images to be widely disseminated, could satisfy her desire for self-promotion. Its relative speed of execution —compared to painting—opened the door for her to express all of her fantasies, allowing, for instance, some five hundred pictures of herself to be taken by Pierre-Louis Pierson, the photographer to the court of Napoleon III. From its earliest days photography thus embraced the feminine subject just as painting had done before it. And the feeling was mutual: female models posed with delight in the salons on Paris’s Grands Boulevards, where La Castiglione would dress up as the Queen of Etruria—in the typical 19th-century style of aping previous eras — and bourgeois women would picture themselves as La Castiglione. They quickly adopted these photographic portraits and the practice of portraiture spread to the emerging middle class. This space in which to project another imagined self, always in a staged setting, became a powerful tool of social construction. It reflected a desired identity, created with the extensive use of scenery, props and even wigs and was embellished with a few touch-ups.

Photographic portraits began circulating in the 1860s in a visiting card format and were avidly collected, as baseball cards would later be traded in schoolyards. Tens of thousands of copies of the likenesses of Sarah Bernhardt, Queen Victoria and even Napoleon III were printed, bearing the stamp of the photographer’s studio: Nadar, Disdéri, Carjat or Mayer & Pierson. Members of the bourgeois class aspiring to the fineries of aristocracy and the world of the stage could now place their own distinguished portrait alongside these illustrious figures, sometimes going so far as to imitate the poses of the luminaries in carefully arranged albums. Although Zola and Baudelaire decried the standardization of the self-image it introduced and the resulting social conformism, photography was unstoppable and would soon be entering every household.

In news journals, on the eve of World War I, and later in gazettes and fashion magazines, engravings and hand-drawn illustrations made way for photographs. Gradually, a new figure emerged, one who could convey any fantasy: the fashion photographer. Aided by the fashion designer (today’s ubiquitous stylist played no part in image-making at the time), the fashion photographer was now the one to shape the feminine ideal. In a context of mass dissemination, the maker of images unwittingly became the standard-setter of elegance.

FPRECEDING DOUBLE PAGE

Simone d’Aillencourt, a celebrity model in the 1950s and ‘60s, photographed in 1960 by Melvin Sokolsky for Harper’s Bazaar. Sokolsky’s surrealist compositions revolutionized fashion photography in the 1960s.RIGHT PAGE Margaret Horan photographed in 1935 by Edward Steichen, a pioneer of fashion photography in the early 20th century.


One of fashion’s most illustrious photographers, a pioneer of the genre as of the 1920s, was Edward Steichen. He shot pictures for Vogue and Vanity Fair portraying women in stylish interiors, where minimalist geometric shapes create an architecture that was accessorized with a few objects: a grand piano here, an African sculpture there, his recurring staircase motif, all of these items hinted at—as elliptical as the reference may be—a luxurious setting. Like the designs she wears or the painted canvas she stands before, the woman is an object of style. More than a portrait, the image is the expression of an ideal of elegance to which the viewer aspires. The model is generally photographed head to toe, offering a full-length view of the outfit and room for a feminine pose that is often reinforced by silhouetted shadows or mirrored reflections. In a more whimsical style, another Vogue photographer, the Englishman Cecil Beaton, would also paint women in sumptuous settings. They were ethereal creatures draped in elegance and playing on the great stage that is fashion. Norman Parkinson, an eccentric figure who contributed to fashion photography in the postwar years up until the 1980s, pushed further, producing many images depicting women as divine creatures, measuring their beauty against celebrated monuments.

The postwar period nurtured the development of a new feminine ideal. Fashion grew bolder and models left the stylish studios with their velvet drapes to interact with the outdoor world. Martin Munkácsi and Richard Avedon in his early career portrayed happy women running and jumping in playful beach scenes.

RIGHT The model Tamaris by Edward Steichen in 1925. FACING PAGE The American actress Adrienne Ames by the fashion photographer and portraitist Cecil Beaton, 1933.


ABOVE Fashion photograph by Norman Parkinson for British Vogue, 1956. In the background, Shore Temple in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. Parkinson was little known despite a career spanning more than fifty years as a fashion photographer and portraitist. He specialized almost exclusively in outdoor shots. RIGHT PAGE Simone d’Aillencourt by Melvin Sokolsky for Harper’s Bazaar, 1960.


illiam Klein would undeniably pioneer this trend by thrusting his models into the turmoil of urban life in full swing, such as could be seen in the streets of Manhattan or Rome. It is no coincidence that the 1950s saw the emergence of a woman who would be known as the “supermodel” toward the end of the 1980s: a face that was familiar in every household. Simone d’Aillencourt, a favorite model of William Klein and Melvin Sokolsky, epitomized the dynamic, liberated woman. Hers was an elegance that escaped the refined studio setting to hit the pavement. Elegance had definitely become a matter of attitude rather than clothing or environment.

Now for a closer look with a case study: Paris, 1963. A bubble floats on the Seine. Inside is a woman, haute couture and much, much more. American photographer Sokolsky, the author of iconic shots in the history of fashion photography, took great care to engineer the subject’s poses in his work, especially this series, making incremental adjustments in tandem with his model to achieve harmony. Simone d’Aillencourt, his muse, joins him in this near-choreographic quest. In the cocked hip, angled arms and hands, long crossed fingers and sharply tilted head, there is no realism, only an extreme stylization of the female body evoking the slender young girls painted by Balthus. Rather than grandiloquent lyricism, the woman’s body conveys a hint of strangeness, coaxing fashion photography out of the anesthetizing comfort of its folds of white silk. Elegance has become a shared quest of the photographer and the model for a photographic climax.

The high priestess of fashion, Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland, often repeated that real elegance is in the mind and is the prerequisite of any other form of elegance. This was in the 1960s, a decisive decade for fashion photography, in which it finally freed itself from the overly formal tone that often characterized pre-war images. For a time the image of fashion would find its freedom and, in its golden age, celebrate whimsy and character in a play of the mind and the body, sweeping away conventions and rules to reveal elegance—in the expression of something unique, in a woman, in an era—suspended in a photographic instant.

W ABOVE Simone & Nina, on the Spanish Steps, Rome. Photograph taken by William Klein for Vogue, 1960. At the time, Klein was already taking fashion photographs in the street, amid passing strangers. Here, the artist is positioned above his subjects and some distance away; he uses a telephoto lens to retain the natural atmosphere and scene around the models. RIGHT PAGE Simone d’Aillencourt in one of Melvin Sokolsky’s famous bubbles, for Harper’s Bazaar, 1963. The Plexiglas bubble was made by aeronautical engineers and hoisted up with a crane; the photographer then erased the suspension cables from the picture by scratching the negative.


Cinema’s paragons of elegance include Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich,

Audrey and Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart and too many others to mention.

But the merest murmur of their names conjures up the magic.

by Jean-Michel Frodon

On and Off-Screen Elegance


n matters of elegance, be it the movies or in real life, it is almost universally agreed that it comes down to a question of personal taste. So what follows is purely subjective. If asked to name the most picture-perfect icon of on-screen elegance, this author’s unhesitating reply would be Fred Astaire.

It’s not just about the impeccably cut tuxedo or the dapper glossy top hat and cane. Elegance doesn’t boil down to clothing or accessories, although they are naturally a part of it. It’s not even simply the spellbinding grace of the man who danced in Swing Time. A great deal has to do with the way he carries his head or places his arms and hands. It’s about the rhythm in his most ordinary of gestures. It is a recognition of how the most banal situations can be enhanced and that is something that is within everyone’s reach, although precious few concern themselves with it. Yet virtually no one achieves that degree of harmony, that perfect balance of rigor and nonchalance.

The differences between the oft-compared Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, that other prodigious musical-film dancer, jump out at you when you see them in action; or when you watch the legendary duo of Kelly and the sophisticated Cyd Charisse in the iconic Singin’ in the Rain. The film features the most extravagant fashion parade in film history, a tribute to Hollywood’s top costume designer, Walter Plunkett, played out to the song Beautiful Girl. It’s humorous, inventive and spectacular all at once. And yet, is it elegant?

Fred Astaire was born Fredrerick Austerlitz and his father hailed from Linz, Austria. It seems fair to make the connection between elegance—a certain type of elegance—and Europe. In Hollywood cinema, the last word in film-directing elegance is attributable to the German-born Ernst Lubitsch. The famous “Lubitsch touch,” much admired by François Truffaut, is reflected in his delicate compositions of sentiment and suggestion, in the way the actors move around. The ballet of words, looks and silences that make up The Shop Around the Corner perhaps offers the finest example. Also nurtured by Mitteleuropa but with different visual and narrative means, the couple formed by Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich offers yet another example of total elegance, which neither fully achieves without the other.

Is this to say that American cinema owes its elegance solely to the Europeans? Far from it. In fact, it is curious to note that among Hollywood’s most iconic figures of elegance two stars, both bearing the last name of Hepburn, outshine the rest: the American Katharine and the Englishwoman Audrey. They perfectly represent two faces (there are others) of elegance in film: that of the Old World and that of the New. They are rarities. For every Louise Brooks, whose unconventional beauty carried with it a whiff of scandal, for every Greta Garbo with her carefully cultivated Nordic mystery, there are ten, twenty, fifty beauties whose feminine charms would get generations of Tex Avery wolves howling.

O

PRECEDING DOUBLE PAGE Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood For Love, 2000. RIGHT PAGE Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in Mark Sandrich’s musical comedy Top Hat, 1935. FOLLOWING PAGE Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961. PAGE 117 Portrait of the American actress Katharine Hepburn in 1938 by Alfred Eisenstaedt for Life magazine.



Yet from Jean Harlow to Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, from Bette Davis to Gene Tierney and Liz Taylor, from Julia Roberts to Sharon Stone, all of whom incarnate the numerous ideals of male fantasies, it would seem that, apart from the two Hepburns, Lauren Bacall alone personifies elegance.

Men have more of what it takes in America it has to be said. The likes of Cary Grant (even clad in a fluffy white robe), James Stewart (even in his cowboy costume), Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen all have that extra je ne sais quoi, a mixture of restraint and just the right amount of eccentricity, whose every gesture seems just a tiny bit exaggerated, like a secret, a complex sign that isn’t just about sex appeal. Misogyny, in its most common manifestation in the film industry, namely the portrayal of women as objects, is one of the worst enemies of elegance.

Action films are the ultimate challenge for elegance and very often it is entirely down to the actor. It befalls the paragon of the genre, James Bond, who is required to pull off the most improbable capers and punish his numerous and formidable enemies without losing an ounce of signature chic. The elegance of the famous MI6 agent was meticulously defined by his author, the novelist Ian Fleming, through a wealth of details woven skillfully together as excellently described by Kingsley Amis in his seminal The James Bond Dossier. The one actor who is the indisputable incarnation of Fleming’s hero, no matter who was directing him in the role, is Sean Connery. There is a unique coherence in his physique, his body language, the way he wears his suits and accessories not to mention a sense of “what lies beneath.” Meanwhile, the current 007, Daniel Craig, is reinventing the character, lending him greater physical strength and psychological depth; and yet elegance precludes the visible demonstration of strength and the display of inner motivations.

There is a wealth of evidence of Europe’s advantage in this field. Take northern Europe from London to Vienna. Latin or Mediterranean charm exploits different, more sensual channels—witness the stars of Italian cinema, the dive of the 20th century: Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Anna Magnani, Stefania Sandrelli and Monica Bellucci. Of course, there are exceptions: Lucia Bosè, Monica Vitti and, among the men, Vittorio Gassman and Marcello Mastroianni, the latter bringing a light and graceful poetry to the archetypal Latin lover.

RIGHT Portrait of the American actor Gary Cooper, circa 1940. FACING PAGE Sean Connery playing a sexy James Bond in the British film Goldfinger directed by Guy Hamilton, 1964.


A lthough France invented the explicitly elegant movie star in the first decade of the 20th century with Max Linder, it has leaned to a more Latin style of appeal and elegance is rarely the defining quality of its greatest actors. But here, too, there are counterexamples: among the women, whose voice usually plays a major role in their way of being both very present and absent, of melting away or dissolving into a shadow or the light, such rarities as Danielle Darrieux, Bulle Ogier and Jeanne Balibar stand out. Other qualities are at work in the men, with Louis Jouvet’s splendidly sharp, well-honed acting style or the strained, secret humanity in Michel Piccoli, anxious yet jovial, neatly packaged in his impeccable appearance even when stark naked and growling in Themroc or binge-eating in La Grande Bouffe. A man’s feminine side, which can be admirably captured on film, brings its own elegance, often in those who have an unconventional type of beauty, such as Michel Simon and Gérard Depardieu, and in those who manage to express their obvious beauty in different ways like Louis Garrel.

But it is unfair and misguided to place responsibility for the question of elegance entirely with the actors when it’s often only expressed in their screen presence, in the way they are filmed. Elegance is a promise that can only be fulfilled thanks to a director. Jean-Luc Godard’s manner of spinning the camera around Anna Karina the first time the character in The Little Soldier sees her; Maurice Pialat enhancing the already immense natural gifts of Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert in Loulou; Michelangelo Antonioni filming Monica Vitti (and not Jeanne Moreau) in La Notte; and François Truffaut’s directing of Fanny Ardant in Confidentially Yours. It is not a question of skill

or talent or even genius. No, it’s more complicated than that. Ingmar Bergman is a genius who made memorable films with magnificent women whom he loved, but even they are tinged with misogyny. The only actors whose elegance he truly rendered were Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries and Max von Sydow in the many films they worked on together.

But it is at the other end of the film spectrum, with the arrival of women in a certain type of action movie, martial arts or wuxia films, that cinematographic elegance would reach new heights. The director King Hu reinvented the genre with his exceptional sense of rhythm and forms. In the mid-1960s, he introduced female actors (who were also dancers and acrobats) in his films—Cheng Pei-pei in Come Drink With Me followed by Hsu Feng in A Touch of Zen. They brought a different kind of presence, different movements, tempos, contrasts, all echoed in the lighting and the use of nature or objects. Through the film’s action and choreography, the inventor of the modern martial arts film created a dynamic around his female actors, their physique enhanced by a very non-Western restraint, drawing out their resources to an unsurpassed degree. Exactly what Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill or Ang Lee in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon went to exhausting lengths to rival.

In the crime film and gun fu genres John Woo and Johnnie To, not to mention Wong Kar-Wai in his romantic In the Mood for Love, his sci-fi movie 2046 and his kung fu films (Ashes of Time, The Grandmaster), provided its most accomplished visual and spiritual expression. Nothing, of course, tops Wong Kar-Wai when he was filming that pure incarnation of cinematographic elegance, the ultra-contemporary and eternal Maggie Cheung.

ABOVE AND RIGHT French actress Fanny Ardant in François Truffaut’s 1982 film Vivement dimanche !, based on the 1962 novel by Charles Williams, The Long Saturday Night; French singer and actor Yves Montand, 1966; American actor Cary Grant examining footage from the shoot of Kiss and Make-Up by Harlan Thompson and Jean Negulesco (released in 1934); Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi in the wuxia film Hero directed by Zhang Yimou, 2002.


CREDITSCOVER © Condé Nast Archive / Corbis Images / Contrasto, graphic design © Cartier. EDITORIAL Page 5: © Denis Darzacq / Agence VU’. PORTFOLIO Pages 8-9: © Tim Flach / Getty Images. Pages 10-11: © Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images for Cartier International. Pages 12-13 and 16-17: © Steve McCurry / Contrasto. Pages 14-15: © Eric Sander. Pages 18-19: © Michael Poliza. Page 20: © Ambroise Ngaimoko, Studio 3Z/3C Courtesy, galerie Magnin-A, Paris. Page 21: © Héctor Mediavilla / Pandora / Picturetank. Page 22: © Elliott Erwitt / Contrasto. Page 23: © Dennis Stock / Contrasto. Pages 24-25: © Adriana Zehbrauskas / The New York Times / Contrasto. Pages 26-27: Nils Herrmann © Cartier. Pages 28-29: © Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris / AKG / Mondadori Portfolio. Pages 30-31: © Paolo Verzone / Agence VU’. ON THE VIRTUE OF ELEGANCE Pages 34-35: © Justin Pumfrey /Getty Images. Page 37: © Simon Roberts / Gallery Stock. Pages 38-39: © David Burnett / Contact Press Images / LUZphoto. DANDIES PAST AND PRESENT Pages 40-41: © Bridgeman Images / Archives Alinari, Florence. Pages 41, 44 and 47 left: © Rose Callahan. Page 42: © Musées de la Ville de Boulogne-Billancourt – Photo Philippe Fuzeau by Siae 2015. Pages 44-45: © Franck Raux / RMN-Réunion des Musées Nationaux / distr. Archives Alinari, Florence. Page 47 right: © Lewandowski Hervé / RMN-Réunion des Musées Nationaux / distr. Archives Alinari, Florence. THE TOUCH OF BEAUTY From pages 48 to 57: Aurore de la Morinerie © Cartier. DESIGN: FORM AND FUNCTION Page 58: © Peter Stackpole / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images. Page 61: © Jean-Claude Planchet / RMN-Réunion des Musées Nationaux / distr. Archives Alinari, Florence by Siae 2015. AN EXPRESSIVE

SINGULARITY From pages 62 to 67: © Eric Sander. THE RHYTHM OF BODIES, THE MELODY OF DRAPERY Pages 68-69: © The Trustees of the British Museum / Archives Alinari, Florence. Page 71: © Thierry Ollivier / Archives Alinari, Florence. Page 72: © Lewandowski Hervé / RMN-Réunion des Musées Nationaux / distr. Archives Alinari, Florence; © 2015. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Art Resource / Scala, Florence; © Claudio Franzini, Venise; DeA Picture Library, licence accordée à Archives Alinari, Florence. Page 73: Condé Nast Archive / Corbis Images / Contrasto. Page 74: © DeA Picture Library, licence accordée à Archives Alinari. FOR MEN ONLY From pages 76 to 85: Eric Sauvage © Cartier. Acknowledgments: Lanvin and Paul Smith. IRIS VAN HERPEN: A PERFECT BALANCE From pages 86 to 90: © Morgan O’Donovan. Page 91: © Mathieu César / Iconoclast Image. Page 92: © Britta Pedersen / dpa / Corbis Images / Contrasto. Page 93: © Boy Kortekaas. ELSIE DE WOLFE:

HIGH PRIESTESS OF TASTE Page 95: © 2015. Foto Nat. Portrait Gall. Smithsonian / Art Resource / Scala, Florence by Siae 2015. Pages 96, 97 and 100: © Simon Watson / Trunk Archive / Contrasto. Page 99: © Bettmann / Corbis Images / Contrasto. THROUGH THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S EYE Pages 102-103, 109 and 111: © Melvin Sokolsky - www.sokolsky.com. Pages 105 and 106: © Edward Steichen / Vogue / Condé Nast by Siae 2015. Page 107: © Cecil Beaton / Vogue / Conde Nast by Siae 2015. Page 108: © Norman Parkinson Ltd. / courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive by Siae 2015. Page 110: © William Klein by Siae 2015. ON AND OFF-SCREEN ELEGANCE Pages 112-113: © Block 2 pics / Jet Tone / The Kobal Collection. Pages 115 and 118: © John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images. Page 116: © Paramount / The Kobal Collection / Fraker Bud. Page 117: © Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images. Page 119: © Rue des Archives / IPA. Page 120: © William Karel / Sygma / Corbis Images / Contrasto; © Hulton Archive / Getty Images; © Ministère de la Culture - Médiathèque du Patrimoine / Studio Harcourt / RMN-Réunion des Musées Nationaux / distr. Archives Alinari, Florence; © Russel Wong / Corbis Images / Contrasto. CREDITS Page 123: © Tim Flach / Getty Images.

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Yes1!11I wish to subscribe or to collect Cartier ArtArt. Three letters that stand at the heart of a single word: Cartier. These three letters express both a jeweler’s vocation and the essence of our magazine, Cartier Art. In a world evolving at the speed of light, Cartier Art takes the time to explore art in all its multiple forms, from the art of living to art as expression and a means of inquiry. Published three times a year and available on the App Store.

Documents

EDITO RIAL · 2019. 8. 5. · ELEGANCE N ° 42 p. 8 p.34 p. 40 p. 58 p. 62 p. 86 p. 94 p. 102 p. 112 p. 76 Editorial 4 // Portfolio 8 // On the Virtue of Elegance 34 // Dandies Past