Acquiring Chic
Posted on October 20th, 2008 by admin
Forgetting elegance and spending (and some spenders do look godawful, to be sure), aren’t there certain fashionable women who do not spend that much? Certainly! We call them chic. They seem to sense when to tuck the blouse in or leave it out, stand up the collar, chop off the pants to make Bermudas, wear chokers instead of chains, eschew the satin skirt for satin knickers, pair them with a backless rather than frontless halter. So how do they know?
Well, many of them live in the fashion world. I rarely see a fabulously pulled-together non-rich woman who doesn’t have something to do with the fashion business. But can we acquire chic? Unequivocally yes, says Carrie Donovan, fashion editor of The New York Times Magazine and previously fashion editor of both Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. “Ralph Lauren is from the Bronx, so is Calvin Klein. I came from a farm in Lake Placid and Bill Blass is from Indiana. The first and only thing you need is desire. . . . You have to want to have taste. Some people have inherently bad taste. Their problem is really not the bad taste—that can be fixed—but that they don’t know they have it!”
Carrie says you start with desire, after which “You study . . . pore over fashion and decorating magazines, books, newspaper clippings, absorb, osmose! This is your sinking-in period and may take years. You experiment. . . . Try on and discard, try on and discard, reject and endorse. You work at it until your eye gets better and finally you are . . . there! Try to examine beautiful clothes even if you can’t own them,” says Carrie. “Get the feel of what those designers did. It does rub off. If you never associate with anything but cheap, your taste cannot get better. No, all this association shouldn’t create envy . . . it educates you.”
Cosmo’s fashion editor, Nancy Benson, says fashion flair requires a little nerve . . . feeling that you, by God, can bring it off. . . . Going right out there proudly in your assembled concoctions.
Now, all this presupposes that you want to “follow fashion,” to be chic. You don’t have to. Plenty of normal, beloved women do not, nor are any of us really “helpless pawns of the industry.” If you decide to “sit fashion out,” you can always dress from what’s in your closet plus a few non-faddy new things. Stores in every city carry basics. My opinion is that having the kind of chic and flair Carrie is talking about is like sex after forty. You can decide to let sex slip away, not participate, or you can get on the train, hang on to your seat around the curves and have a great sex life. You can sign up for fashion and enjoy it as a game and art form, rather than just pass it by.