Why Elegant Women Don't Follow Trends

Trends run on a pendulum: when everyone tires of one thing, fashion swings to its opposite, so followers are permanently behind and permanently spending. Trends do meet real emotional needs, rules, belonging, validation, but they confiscate all of it every six months. Elegant women opt out by building a personal style and a permanent wardrobe, so their confidence comes from within and cannot be taken away.

I worked as a lawyer on the Champs-Élysées and grew up spending summers at my grandparents' château in the south of France, and yet the first time I heard the words "fashion trend" was two years ago, when I started my channel. I had spent my whole life among women considered elegant, and the concept simply did not exist there.

Watching my first trend video, I understood why so many women feel bad in their clothes. Trends expect you to be fashionable, where true elegance expects you to be stylish; the first keeps you feeling there is something wrong with you, the second makes you proud of who you are. Here is how trends actually work, and what to do instead.

How do fashion trends actually work?

As a chase that never ends. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European courts sent each other miniature dolls dressed in the fashion of the moment, so royals could compare and copy one another; fashion belonged to them alone. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women who could afford it began copying the courts, the courts changed to escape being copied, and the trend cycle was born. The sociologist Georg Simmel was describing this chase-and-flight mechanism as early as 1904. Social media has since accelerated it beyond recognition: a celebrity's outfit can be copied the next day by anyone with a phone, and we tire of everything faster than ever.

The direction of the swing is always the same: the opposite. When everyone tires of logos, colour, and busyness, quiet luxury arrives as a relief; when quiet luxury starts to feel plain, maximalism and joy come back. Line up dresses from the late 1700s to the 1950s and the pendulum is unmistakable. Which is exactly why followers always feel behind: the destination moves to its opposite, constantly, and that is terrible for your self-esteem and your finances alike.

Trends expect you to be fashionable. True elegance expects you to be stylish.

Why does following trends feel so good?

Because trends solve real emotional problems. They tell you how to dress, what to buy, and what to pair it with, removing the fear of getting it wrong. They make you feel you belong to the group, an archaic need wired deep in us, since for most of history, exclusion meant you did not survive. They hand you certainty that how you show up is validated by society, proven on other women, and they give the satisfying illusion of being current, of keeping up. None of this is vanity; these are genuine human needs.

The problem is how the trend solves them. It grants the rules, the belonging, the proof, and then takes everything back six months later, so you must rebuild it all, again and again. The confidence was never yours; it was on loan.

What do elegant women do instead of following trends?

They source the rules, the belonging, and the confidence from themselves, by building a personal style, because nothing can take that away, and it never needs rebuilding. It changes even how they think about buying. A woman recently asked me how I organise my purchases for each season, and I genuinely did not understand the question at first: an elegant woman does not think in seasons, she builds a wardrobe. When I see a piece, I never wonder whether it fits this season; I wonder whether it fits my wardrobe, and how I want to present myself to the world.

She can still buy a trending piece, for the right reason. I recently bought a little woven-leather basket bag I had first seen in a random Paris shop and could not stop thinking about for months. Then I noticed it everywhere and discovered it was trending, and it bothered me enough that I almost did not buy it. I bought it anyway, because the obsession told me it was a perfect addition to my wardrobe, and you will still see me wearing it in ten years, trend or anti-trend. And no, I would not carry it in winter, not because the trend expires, but because the story of a woven summer basket does not match a winter outfit. The object's story decides, never the season's fashion.

How do you find your own style?

Start by collecting, without analysing. Save pictures of outfits that make your tummy smile; you do not need to know why you like them. Then look at the board as a whole, and you will find commonalities running through it, in silhouettes, materials, colours, and details. Those commonalities are your essence expressed in fashion, and they become the brief for every future purchase.

Personal style is exactly that mix: understanding who you are and what you want to portray, then finding the pieces that portray it. For a private client based in Hawaii, warm, almost regal, serving very high-net-worth clients, I built outfits that carried her attachment to the islands and her regal presence, structured enough to say reliable. That is a wardrobe as a foundation: outfits she will wear for many years, because they are her.

What changes when you stop following trends?

Your confidence changes address. You are no longer grounded in whatever is happening outside you, forever catching up; you are grounded in who you are, refining how you express it. Your money changes behaviour too: what you spend on a piece you will wear for life never needs re-spending on its opposite, and it works for you, because presenting yourself well opens doors and creates opportunities.

And one last argument. The fashion industry, amplified by social media, would have you believe there is one way to be beautiful, one way to dress well, one right face and one right hair. It is simply untrue. I am yet to see a woman who is not beautiful, and before you offer yourself as the exception, understand that I will see the beauty in you; you have just been shown a narrow spectrum of what beautiful can be, where paintings, books, old films, and history hold so many more. When you finally find the right way to express your own beauty, you feel like a different person, and every woman should have that.