What Social Media Gets Wrong About Elegance

Social media teaches elegance backwards. True elegance is not an aesthetic you purchase, a strategy for marrying rich, a submissive way of sitting, a rulebook you can fail, or a performance of perfection. It is a way of being: comfort and ease, etiquette as consideration for others, boundaries enforced softly but firmly, and above all, standards you hold for yourself even when nobody is watching.

I learned about elegance before it was on social media, over childhood summers at my grandparents' château in the south of France, where my grandmother, haute bourgeoisie through and through, taught me everything there was to know about elegance and etiquette. When I see how elegance is taught online, I feel sorry, because it is completely backwards.

Elegance is not about looking rich, knowing etiquette by heart, or making yourself desirable to a wealthy man. It is deeper than that, and far more useful. This essay grew out of a conversation with my mother about what real elegance is, distilled into seven points.

Is elegance something you can buy?

No, and this is social media's first inversion. Online, elegance is depicted as an aesthetic: dress like this, own that, and you will be considered elegant. Framed that way, elegance becomes something you purchase, which quietly locks out anyone who cannot afford the designer slingbacks. In truth, elegance is a way of being that tends to translate into an aesthetic; the purchases, when they come, are a result of who you are and the standards you hold, never the source of them.

Let me reassure you: my grandmother did not go around the château with an icon bag; I doubt she owned one. My grandfather was a professor, my grandmother a painter, and the château itself, bought as a ruin and rebuilt from the ground up, was paid for by auctioning a painting of great value her master had gifted her. They had means, not social-media means, and they remain the most elegant people I know. Much of the French aristocracy lives the same way: good income, no penthouse, and elegance that flows entirely from who they are.

If you are truly elegant, you will be elegant when nobody is watching.

Is elegance a way to marry rich?

I hold no judgment toward women who wish to marry someone wealthier; socially, it is as old a path as any. What I mind is presenting elegance as the means to get there, because it makes elegance performative: a set of rules learned to pretend you already belong to a circle, so you can attract someone who does. It turns elegance transactional.

Real elegance is the opposite: a set of conduct guidelines you hold for yourself, with other people and alone. You do not develop it to marry rich; you develop it because it aligns with how you want to carry yourself through the world.

Does elegance make a woman submissive?

Social media's version does. The demure poses, the duchess slant, the proper lady arranged quietly in the background: these carry a submissive connotation that may make sense for royalty on display, and makes no sense for a woman in the twenty-first century leading teams and businesses. We have worked too hard for our space and our respect to be taught smallness as refinement. True elegance gives you power, because you learn to be liked and respected at the same time: there is a calm, a wisdom to a truly elegant woman that is rare, and rooms respond to it, in promotions, negotiations, and opportunities alike.

The content you will never see online is the other half of politeness: enforcing your boundaries. Recently, at dinner in a storied Parisian restaurant celebrating a big bet we are making on Mademoiselle Spends, the woman at the next table was editing videos with the sound on. The submissive move would have been silence; the inelegant one, aggression. Instead I touched her shoulder as delicately as one finger can, and asked, very softly, whether she would mind turning the sound down. She was so disarmed by the softness that she simply said of course, and the evening was saved. Firm in the request, soft in the delivery: that is elegant power, and it is the most effective way I know to get what you want.

What is etiquette actually for?

Not for grading you. Online, etiquette is a rulebook you can fail: hold the fork wrongly and everyone will see you are not a real elegant woman. In true elegant circles, etiquette exists to make everything smooth for everybody, a kind of dance in which nobody gets in anyone's way and nobody is made to feel awkward.

Take the business dinner, where the host is expected to order the wine. If you do not know the rule and your guest does, she will not sit there deciding never to work with you. She will gently offer to order the wine, or simply begin, precisely to spare you the awkwardness. That is real etiquette: the most elegant person in the room is the one making everyone else feel comfortable, welcome, and validated.

Does elegance require perfection?

It requires the opposite. The elegant women of social media have the perfect house, husband, children, hair, skin, body, and bank account, and the effect on you is the feeling that you are failing at life. True elegance is to be at ease: at ease when you cannot find your words, when you twist an ankle on your heels, when you do not know something, when you change your mind, when you say something wrong.

A truly elegant woman carries the inner knowing that she is worthy regardless of what people think, where performed perfection broadcasts the opposite: that she needs approval to feel good about herself. So spend your energy on being at peace with yourself, the pimple, the cracked heel, the gap in your knowledge, and know that the people who will not accept you as you are were never worth your time.

What is elegance at its core?

Standards you hold for yourself, and a story from my husband's family says it better than any definition. My father-in-law and his family were refugees during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, living for months in a camp where getting water meant queueing the entire day, never knowing whether the tank would run dry before your turn. People cut the line; people cheated. He decided he would not be one of them, even if it meant bringing no water home to his family that evening, because cheating would have broken the standards he holds for himself.

That is true elegance, and you will not find it on social media. Real standards are not always the easy path; a truly elegant person will act against her own interest to stay true to them. If you behave elegantly only when it benefits you, you are not elegant; you are performing.

How do you know if you are truly elegant?

You are elegant when nobody is watching, for yourself, because that is how you have decided to live.

So before learning any etiquette, before the first designer purchase, ask the only foundational question: what are the standards I want to observe in my life? What matters so much to me that abandoning it would be a disrespect to myself? It is not difficult, and it is the requirement everything else rests on. The teacup can wait.