TODAY SISYPHUS WOULD TAKE SELFIES WITH HIS ROCK
If elegance is an attitude, Frédéric Beigbeder is elegant in the extreme. Here the French firebrand presents his very personal manifesto defining what does – and what most definitely doesn’t – encapsulate the quality.
Supreme elegance is a surfer standing on a w ave. Anyone else is vulgar. He is par t of what makes the world. But even the surfer, lying on his board before getting up, is grotesque and pathetic... and naturally he is r idiculous when after just three seconds of eter nal glory, he drowns himself in a whirlpool of salt w ater. The problem is that we never stay elegant for very long. An elegant man is an inelegant one who disguises himself . Sisyphus is chic only at the top of his mountain. His efforts do not concer n us. Today Sisyphus would take selfies with his rock. While on the subject, selfies should be banned. Are the billions of people who take pictures of themselves aware of their vulgarity? The thing that I find par ticularly inelegant is a shirt that is too tight-fitting and mak es the stomach look like a stuffed sausage after dinner. It was fashionable when Slimane was at Dior – a very cruel period during which I never dared to sit down for fear of transfor ming myself into a living sausage. I like shirts with an Italian collar, synonymous with ir ritating nonchalance, but I hate openshirt poseurs, except in seaside resorts; I prefer to close the top button and wear a woollen tie, which is reassuring in these times of doubt about the futur e of humanity.
I know what you are going to tell me: my choices are not very original. I assume: in clothing, I do not have a taste for r isk. One night, to look young, I put on sneakers with a dinner jacket. It was the worst night of my life. I believe that the g reat injustice of being a man is that inelegance is never forgiven. If a woman commits a fashion error, it is char ming; when a man crashes in this r egard, it is ir reparable. Look at Donald Trump, the American Berlusconi, and his shiny red ties, his stained shir ts, his too-long trousers, his comical hair. Such an accumulation of errors renders him politically inaudible. He disqualifies himself by his inelegance even before he starts spitting out his lies and his insults. Barack Obama, on the other hand, was so classy that he could sa y the most banal things and do bugger all for four years. I had lunch yesterday with one of the most elegant men I kno w: Philippe Lançon, a wr iter who got a Kalashnikov bullet in the chin. His f ace was reconstructed in 17 operations. He has a broken face but a wonderfully post-traumatic dandyism, alternating fits of despair with g ratitude for being alive. Inelegance would be yelling, making a noise and cr ying for vengeance. I like Arturo Bandini in the novel Ask the
Dust because he stumbles nicely; the opposite of elegance is self-confidence. I loved Luigi d’Urso because he always seemed to be just getting out of bed. This reminds me of a Turkish saying: “They call it chaos, we call it home.” Elegance is not car ing about elegance. People who think too much about it become g ross: they frown, they have worried faces in their pitiful Instag rams. Michel Houellebecq in a three-piece jacket with a bowler hat on the day of his wedding, last September 21, might come across as inelegant because overly affected, but when his wife said, “I do,” he star ted crying in front of all his guests, and he instantly became the most mo ving man in the world. It’s like that day in January when I saw a shooting at the Ritz bar. The hooded killers were in jogging outfits. Such mediocrity... If they had shot at me in a Gucci suit, I think I would have forgiven them everything.