Deconstructing “Chic”: What Does Fashion’s Favorite Buzzword Really Mean?

A little French, a little ambiguous – “chic” is one word that fashion people love to throw around with abandon. But what the hell does it mean? And how do you get it? Let’s peel this sartorial mystery like an onion and get cooking.

Americans love to buy into the idea that French people are morally superior to everyone else in the world, and if you’ve ever consumed a fashion magazine, blog, or TV show, you’ll know that French women practically slide out of the womb knowing how to be stylish.

Chic is a word used to describe a particular kind of style – something elegant, effortless, restrained. Even the word chic looks chic. Who needs the extra letters in words like beautiful, stylish, fashionable, well-dressed? Chic does it all in four letters and has time to smoke a cigarette.

But let’s cut the nonsense. Nobody’s born knowing how to look good. Everything we do in life takes effort, whether or not we show it. Everything we do well, we’ve practiced countless times before. Perhaps it’s just that French women get a head start in childhood, and with guidance from their mothers, they bypass the awkward phase entirely and emerge from puberty as fully-formed chic beings when most of us are still trying to get our bangs to lay flat.

So how can the average person hope to achieve chic? Let’s break down the average chic look and see what it has going for it:

• Lots of black. French women will tell you they wear black to look slimmer. But I’m convinced they wear black because it goes with nearly everything, never looks dirty, is a color that’s always in style, and makes even cheap attire look more expensive. Wear a black sweater twice in one week and no one’s going to notice. And if it’s good enough for Anderson Cooper’s t-shirt, it’s good enough for you.

• Lots of neutral tones. Brown, navy, olive, camel, ivory, gray. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a way to clash if you’re wearing all neutrals. French women act like they’re just better at these things (n’est-ce pas?), but how hard is it to get dressed when you’ve created a system that can’t fail?
• Simplicity. In chic, less is more. Less makeup, less jewelry, fewer accessories, fewer colors.
• An emphasis on grooming. When you’re wearing subdued colors and drawing attention to your face, any imperfections in your hair or makeup is going to stand out. You can be artfully disheveled or have all your hair slicked back, but the common denominator is intention.
• A healthy dose of “I don’t give a fuck.” The less you appear to care, the more people buy into your illusion.

In a comprehensive article by an expatriate living in France, I learned several interesting facts about chic French ladies that have the power to put an end to the collective masturbating Americans do over the illusion of French nonchalance: They don’t leave the house until they’re perfectly dressed and put together. They put a lot of time into personal care, like buying skin-care products, frequent haircuts, hair removal, facials, etc. They take care of their clothes meticulously, spending time ironing crisp shirts, de-pilling sweaters and hand-washing delicates. They look at themselves in the mirror often to fix their hair, smooth their clothes, or touch up lipstick. A French woman would never dream of going to bed without washing her face and applying moisturizer – even if she didn’t get in until 3 a.m.

A-HA!

The trick then, to being chic, is to completely deny that you do all these things and make it look like you roll out of bed looking great. Make no mistake: no one actually rolls out of bed looking great, there’s just an unspoken agreement amongst Teh Chic to answer every compliment with, “Quoi, this old thing?” (For a laugh, watch this video to see a French woman deliver an outrageous lie about using nothing more than “fresh water” to keep her skin clear and glowing. Apparently the fountain of youth is Parisian tap water.)

Everyone has to put the work into it – trying on outfits, changing their minds, doing and redoing their hair until it looks just right, smudging their makeup and fixing it, spending hours online looking for tights that are the exact shade of burgundy to match the dress they’re planning to wear to Thanksgiving. Everyone works at it. People who are chic just know how to cover their tracks and make it look natural.

You don’t have to be a thin, white woman to be chic (despite the proliferation of thin, white women in the mainstream fashion media). After all, chic is about being yourself, letting your natural looks and your personality shine – with a big dose of “don’t care what you think.”

When you’re chic, you don’t dress to impress other people. It’s not about dressing to attract a date. It’s not about following rules, trying to take up as little space as possible, or looking like a productive member of society. Being chic is about dressing to look as fucking awesome on the outside as you feel on the inside.