Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. It is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness particularly in the areas of visual design, decoration, the sciences, and the aesthetics of mathematics. Elegant things exhibit refined grace and suggest maturity.
The adjective elegant for ‘tasteful, selected, fashionable’ was borrowed in the 18th century from the French élégant ‘tasteful’. Around 1800, the noun Elegant also referred to a ‘man dressed to last fashion’. In the French as well as in the German language, the adjective elegantly characterized from the 16th century the “perfect form of linguistic and artistic representation, later also the outer fashionable-tasteful appearance of persons and things”. Initially, elegantia stood for rhetoric borrowed Latin expression for, tasteful fine choice, fineness in particular of expression, decency’; as well as in French, the importance changed since the 18th century to the present sense.
The Collaborative conversational lexicon defines 1905 elegance and delicacy, grace and “linguistically” as already “among the Romans with clarity correctness connected speech, so that the expression is thought reproduces faithful and true, yet grammatically correct, of course, appropriate and aptly. “In the broader sense,” elegance “denotes at all that which gives the impression of the agreeable, especially with the by-name of the new and fashionable; especially in clothing, in home furnishings, etc. ” In 1922, Paul Valéry formulated more generally as follows:” Elegantia- That means transferring freedom and economy into the visible – informality, ease in – difficult matters. Finding, without pretending to have searched – knowing without revealing that one has learned. ”
In the natural sciences, especially in mathematics, elegance means “as much as simplicity and clarity of proof, of a solution “.
In the summer of 2014, a design conference on “elegance” took place in Berlin, curated by the philosopher Hannes Böhringer, the designer Axel Kufus and the photographer Hans Hansen.
General concept
Essential components of the concept include simplicity and consistency of design, focusing on the essential features of an object. In art of any kind one might also require dignified grace, or restrained beauty of style.
Visual stimuli are frequently considered elegant if a small number of colors and stimuli are used, emphasizing the remainder.
Fashion
An elegant young woman sketched by Frenchman Paul César Helleu.
In social life, elegance is the quality of the one who is elegant, and therefore has a certain harmonious grace characterized by lightness and ease in form and movement. In the field of clothing and fashion, it is one of the most common goals of fashion designers.
However, elegance is not primarily a matter of means. Dress code indicates social status and state of mind; a rich person who disdains an outfit that she would have the means to buy is not elegant, while another, which by matching and retouching, makes the most of clothes within reach is indisputably elegant. The uniform can be luxurious; Preventing choice, he is opposed to sartorial elegance, leaving the wearers only with posture and language.
In the same way, elegance is not a style, but a way of expressing oneself. The choice of an outfit appropriate to the circumstances, city, sport, evening is the first of the elegant sequence. In West Africa, one can choose a European elegance, or a boubou elegance.
An elegant woman is a woman carefully dressed. It is the same for a man who will be described as elegant, although, in this case, it may be to emphasize a behavior or an outfit so unnatural as to be affected. To say of a person that she is elegant is a compliment; to define it as one or an elegant is depreciative, implying that it has no other quality or concern, denouncing a superficiality (VE).
In philosophy of science
In the philosophy of science, there are two concepts referring to two aspects of simplicity. Elegance (syntactic simplicity) means the number and complexity of hypotheses. Parsimony (ontological simplicity) is the number and complexity of things postulated.
In mathematics
The proof of a mathematical theorem exhibits mathematical elegance if it is surprisingly simple yet effective and constructive; similarly, a computer program or algorithm is elegant if it uses a small amount of code to great effect.
In engineering
In engineering, a solution may be considered elegant if it uses a non-obvious method to produce a solution which is highly effective and simple. An elegant solution may solve multiple problems at once, especially problems not thought to be inter-related.
In chemistry
In chemistry, chemists might look for elegance in theory and method, in technique and procedure. For example: elegance might comprise creative parsimony and versatility in the utilization of resources, in the manipulation of materials, and in effectiveness in syntheses and analysis.
In pharmacy
In pharmacy, elegance in formulation is important for quality as well as effectiveness in dosage form design, a major component of pharmaceutics.
Elegance as a skill
How to present oneself and to please, elegance is a professional skill. Professional elegance concerns not only the appearance and the manners of the person, but also the simplicity and the coherence of the solutions that it finds with the problems that it has to solve.
Source from Wikipedia