The Chic Industrial Complex

Chic'd to death before breakfast! This essay includes this week's syllabus below.

If you’re me, you’ll wake up to log on to the internet at your leisure and you’ll immediately be accosted by “Things I Find Chic” videos. Having chipped nail polish isn’t chic. Buy some magazines and put them on your coffee table, that’s chic. Doing the Olsen tuck, chic. Monogramming your hairbrush, your pillowcase, your dopp kit…chic.

I feel positively chic to my stomach thinking about how my matching pajama game is adequate at best.

Pre-Tiktokification of chic, I believed the word to function as both an adjective and a verb. An adjective describes your stylish friend who has an elevated sense of taste and personality. The verb is how you live philosophically. Lately, the word chic has felt slippery at best; sometimes meaning minimal, sometimes eccentric, sometimes expensive, sometimes neutral, sometimes peak Grandma-core. While chic certainly does suggest value, way too many people now equate chicness with wealth, which might be the single most boring interpretation of the word.

So what is chic, actually? Does it change over time?
And can someone actually work towards becoming chic?

From what I’ve observed (and studied, and reverse-engineered), chic has two lives entirely:

1. the stable aesthetic canon

2. the mutable cultural translation

(This week’s essay has the syllabus INSIDE the essay, below. I’m trying to work on formatting and making things simple for you guys!)

The Two Faces of Chic:

1A. Capital-C Chic: the stable aesthetic canon

This is the archetype most people picture instinctively. When I think of this version of chic, I think of an attitude rather than a collection of belongings. Capital-C chic should be independent of trends but not devoid of cultural awareness. It’s an energy of movement, how you carry yourself. Of course, the reason chic people tend to dress well is because these qualities manifest themselves into their physical possessions by way of intentional selection, informed by experience. This definition of chic is rooted in both restraint and exploration, proportional to a person’s recurring personal taste.

Think of the images of the eternal chic: Hepburn, Bessette-Kennedy, Philo, Birkin, and all the Parisian archetypes that came before them. This is the version of chic that ruled print media and what I think most people would recognize as “textbook” chic; the crisp white t-shirts, the narrow cigarette pants, the classic trench, the red or neutral pink lip. What’s chic about this definition is the dichotomy between evolution and consistency.

Jane Birkin and that damn basket bag <3

1B. lowercase-c chic: the mutable cultural translation

This is the version haunting your feed. To be clear, despite my frequent commentary on style trends and algorithms and what they might signal as a whole, I don’t deny myself the enjoyment of these “Things I Find Chic” videos. But I do notice that they’re not necessarily stating things that are inherently chic in their own right. That’s because it’s being used as a sort of slang version of chic that relies on itself to adapt to the needs and fantasies of the moment and user rather than a recollection of years of extensive influences. In this version, what is chic is this wealthy, put together, ideal adult woman that we want to be. I recognize her myself, having seen her in my mind’s eye for my entire life: heels always, perfect job, bombshell hair, a full to the brim closet of decadence, someone who actually follows day-to-night styling advice. The expectation of being “chic” as an aesthetic trait is so obviously just repackaged “cool girl”. It mutates quickly because it’s not a philosophy in the way the aforementioned Capital-C chic is: lowercase-c chic is a moodboard of the attitude and confidence we wish we embodied.

(Inside this week’s syllabus featured below, I’ll break down how to audit your own signature styles and pinpoint which silhouettes your eye naturally returns to.)

Decoding Chicness

Historically, “chic” has described wildly different aesthetics: 1920s tomboyish garçonne, 1930s polished Hollywood, 1960s Vreeland era eccentric glamour, 1990s Calvin/Jill Sander/Helmut Lang disheveled minimalism, and 2020s “perceived luxury”. But functioning as lowercase-c chic, 1920s chic ≠ 1960s chic ≠ 2020s chic.

Chic has never been one specific item or aesthetic but it has always described a value system, which is why I believe we’re seeing a bit of the discourse around chic beginning to include certain mannerisms; like sending thank you notes, having a favorite painting in a museum, playing an instrument, and being a good house guest or hostess.

To me, that’s actually a fascinating pivot because it signals that we’ve gotten tired of product, so we started romanticizing behaviors. It could be a step in a more positive direction rather than just products or a list of do’s & don’t but it still begs the question: have we lost sight of our social graces so entirely that we are romanticizing...integrity?

How Gatekeepers Practice Chic:

If you translate chic for the internet era, you’ll find a lot of that second definition of chic. But in that lens, we’ve simply cycled back to an aesthetic genre of self-mythologizing. The only way I believe you should subscribe to the word chic is in the definition “whatever you find most natural to you”. It’s an attitude, an air of confidence in your choices. It’s a shortcut word for good taste without needing to prop up it’s value with the justification of any one behavior. Chic as a descriptor only works when the choices the person is making feel inevitable.

(In the syllabus, I break down the key behavior that consistently shows up across every chic archetype…none of which require purchasing a single object.)

How to Become Chic (Actually) - Syllabus Preamble

Behind the paywall below is the syllabus that complements this essay. It includes behaviors of the most historically chic, audit instructions for your own taste, and literature I believe will help you hone your inner choices.

Think of these instructions as your warm-up…