"We must never confuse elegance with snobbery"
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Saint Laurent draws a hard line between style as discernment and style as dominance. “Elegance” is framed as a discipline: a way of shaping the self with restraint, proportion, and taste. “Snobbery” is the counterfeit version, where the point isn’t beauty but hierarchy. The sentence works because it’s a warning disguised as a maxim: the fashion world runs on signals, and signals are easily weaponized.
Coming from a designer who helped democratize high style - putting tuxedos on women, turning couture codes into ready-to-wear attitude - the intent reads as self-justification and critique at once. He’s defending refinement from the accusation that it’s inherently elitist, while also indicting the industry’s tendency to mistake price, scarcity, and social access for aesthetic value. “Never confuse” implies the confusion is common, almost convenient: snobbery wants to borrow elegance’s moral legitimacy, and elegance is vulnerable to being used as a velvet rope.
The subtext is ethical. Elegance, in Saint Laurent’s sense, is something you practice; snobbery is something you perform at others. One is inward-facing, about coherence and respect for the body and moment. The other is outward-facing, about keeping score. In an era when branding was accelerating and fashion was becoming mass spectacle, he’s insisting that taste can be inclusive even when it’s exacting - and that the truly chic move is refusing to turn aesthetics into a social verdict.
Coming from a designer who helped democratize high style - putting tuxedos on women, turning couture codes into ready-to-wear attitude - the intent reads as self-justification and critique at once. He’s defending refinement from the accusation that it’s inherently elitist, while also indicting the industry’s tendency to mistake price, scarcity, and social access for aesthetic value. “Never confuse” implies the confusion is common, almost convenient: snobbery wants to borrow elegance’s moral legitimacy, and elegance is vulnerable to being used as a velvet rope.
The subtext is ethical. Elegance, in Saint Laurent’s sense, is something you practice; snobbery is something you perform at others. One is inward-facing, about coherence and respect for the body and moment. The other is outward-facing, about keeping score. In an era when branding was accelerating and fashion was becoming mass spectacle, he’s insisting that taste can be inclusive even when it’s exacting - and that the truly chic move is refusing to turn aesthetics into a social verdict.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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