Golden Email #35: Elegance

I'm interested in the concept of "elegance", because it creates a feeling similar to art, and is somewhat close to the concept of beauty, but it is it's own thing, neither art, beauty or anything else, and it's also one of the distinct things that people generally tend to always praise and like. I for example praised it in my text about the k-pop group Girls' Generation (https://kbrecordzz.com/2025/12/hear-me-ramble-about-girls-generation/).

Elegance feels like art, but it isn't art, because elegance can be done by instruction, which art can't (this is pretty much my definition of art). Elegance is when you put much effort into making something simple.

Things can look like elegance without being elegance, like if you copy the look of someone with an elegant fashion style without putting in the same job as they did. Real elegance doesn't come from a look, it comes from a person's intentions. Real elegance is about living in a simple way. And you almost need to put in effort to always achieve simplicity. It's simplicity in all parts, not just making one simple product while your life is something else. That's why we like elegance, because it's such an effort and the highest simplicity because everything fits together and no hole is left unfilled.

You may think a simple life means living a life of minimalism, but doing as little as possible may look simple on the surface, but it actually rather makes things complicated, counterproductive and creates anxiety which leads to more complexity and problems. You can't ever do nothing, so minimalism is always a lie and such a life isn't simple.

So instead of minimalism, and also instead of maximalism, true simplicity is in aiming for the middle-ground. Always doing the one right thing, nothing more and nothing less. That's the simplest way to live. This is where the reserved confidence, the slow-and-steady-ness, the classical yet personal fashion, the showing off while not selling yourself, and the perceived beauty and high praise that comes out of these, comes from, which we usually see as elegance. I think.

In a broader sense elegance can be in a simple mathematical formula, which probably doesn't have very much in common, at least not on the surface, with an elegant woman walking up a stair and slowly and gently touching the staircase handle without ever really gripping it. This kind of elegance that can easily become some kind of selling point, to create attraction in others, is only real elegance if it comes from high effort and good intentions. The difference can't necessarily be seen but it can be felt, at some level. There are certainly other ways to be elegantly dressed and behaved than the typical elegant queen.

So... Elegance is what comes out of the idea that simplicity isn't minimalism, but rather requires lots of effort to achieve. Elegance is simple living, which requires high effort, and this gives rise to the perceived beauty and high praise from people, because people are intuitively impressed by elegance - or more exactly by simplicity that doesn't look like very much but has very much job behind it. They intuitively sense that effort, even if they can't always put words on it.

/kbrecordzz, 2026-07-26