During the last Millennium, the last century, lived a coterie of Manhattan-based jet setters whom Women's Wear Daily referred to as 'goddesses'. American writer Truman Capote gave them the fabulous four a monicker: The Swans. Their names? Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness and C.Z. Guest just to name a few.
They did not wear clothes: they carried them. They created style and it was their very own. The Swans stamped their trademark brand of chic so you saw the woman, not the label. Two were born into the world of the very wealthy; another carved her way up to the top from poor Mexican beginnings and the other blessed with natural thoroughbred looks, happened to be at the right place at the right time when plucked out of obscurity from a Mojave Desert hotel.
Three were trophy wives...one heiress. They created perfect worlds around them down to the most minute detail. Casual did not feature in their venacular. Did their husbands ever see them without make-up? Jamais!
Impeccable. Sleek. Original. Elegant. Vitality. And unfailingly confident... regardless of the many battles that chinked their stylish armour. The Swans kept their storms lives private and images ironed to perfection. Their comportment was impeccable. Only one shocked the establishment when painted in the nude by Diego Rivera...
CZ Guest gave us the twin sets. Slim Keith perfected the trouser look, Babe Paley opted for luncheon shifts and Gloria Guinness left us the scent of mystery.
An innate sense of Aesthetics was their cornerstone. No matter their ups and downs and poignant circumstances, the well-groomed Swans appeared to glide through life with panache and delicious chic no matter the setbacks. Theirs was a quest of perfection.
'Elegance is in the brain just as well as in the body and in the soul.' Gloria Guinness
'Babe Paley only has one fault: she was perfect; otherwise, she was perfect.' Truman Capote
'I never had a plan, I never had a press agent. Now I have people asking me about 'my style'. I don't quite know what to tell them. I mean, style is what you are inside.' C.Z. Guest
"It may be the the enduring swan glides upon the waters of liquified lucre; but that cannot account for the creature herself--her talent, like all talent, is composed of of unpurchasable substances. For a swan is invariably the result of adherence to some aesthetic of thought, a code transposed into a self-portrait; what we see is the imaginary portrait precisely projected.' Truman Capote
