"Elegance is a discipline of life."
-Oscar de la Renta
There was a time, not long ago, when many young American women dreamed, desired and sought to replicate ladies. The sort of women that Truman Capote described perfectly in his October 1959 article for Harpers' Bazaar. In this article, A Gathering of Swans, he quotes from the journal of a young Mr. Patrick Conway who was visiting Bruges in the year 1800.
"Sat on the stone wall and observed a gathering of swans, an aloof armada, coast around the curves of the canal and merge with the twilight, their feathers floating away over the water like the trailing hems of snowy ball-gowns, I was reminded of beautiful women; I thought of Mll. de V., and experienced a cold exquisite spasm, a chill, as though I had heard a poem spoken, fine music rendered. A beautiful woman, beautifully elegant, impresses us as art does, changes the weather of our spirit; and that, is that a frivolous matter? I think not." Do we see women like this anymore? Not many, because our culture no longer celebrates or esteems them. They are top-out-of-sight more than ever.
Just recently, my husband and I were considering vacationing in Miami-Dade County for a few days. It's a quick trip for New Yorkers, and Florida is the usual destination for North East snowbirds. We decided on a staycation instead after the overwhelming news, accompanied by overwhelming pictures of Spring Break chaos. Every media outlet displayed droves of intoxicated twenty somethings in half dress dancing wildly in the streets of Miami. A quiet beach vacation would not be awaiting us.
What struck me most, was not the disobedient behavior or arrests, but the attire (or lack thereof) and overtly sexual antics of the young women. "Stripper chic" was the norm, and gyrating or twerking (or a combination of both) on top of cars was the true epidemic. Definition of epidemic: A widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time. Infectious is exactly what this was and has become with social media. So who is to blame? Most young women today no longer seek to elevate their persons and achieve attention through higher means. They now go low, very low.
I believe our culture has failed them. We have taught young women that sexual liberation is about publicly acting out pornography for attention or money or both, not the ability to make personal, private decisions with their sexual selves and their bodies. The body no longer has a governing spirit. It is a commodity to be bought and sold. We have taught them that being known is better than being respected. We have made role models and millionaires out of the common and coarse goddesses of pop culture. They have no knowledge or reference of anything else worth revering.
The swans of yesterday, who projected images of refinement and cultivation, are a dying breed. Along with climate change and the ignored degradation of our planet, the values that our culture once held high are vanishing as well. One of my favorite coffee table books is, The Last Swan, about the beautiful Italian aristocrat and socialite, Marella Agnelli. She was unearthly elegant, polished and sophisticated. Marella is the perfect example of a bygone era of affluent women that once held up the pedestal for us common folk. Women like this were and are important. They give us a focal point on what the highest level of cultivation looks like. A symbol of aspiration.
"Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." -Oscar Wilde
