Elegant Survival

In a Wall Street Journal article adapted from her new book, “Bringing up Bébé” (Penguin Press; February, 2012) , Pamela Druckerman of France reveals Gallic secrets of educating small children for a lifetime of civilised behaviour. Every parent who is experiencing stress and bewilderment at the process of training tots can benefit from learning traditional French techniques and philosophies that, when effectively employed, will positively affect the most important years of their progeny's lives.
  Why French Parents Are Superior, by Pamela Druckerman

My husband cuts my hair (I have resisted beauty-salons like the plague since Y2K), and is particularly fond of this recent photograph he took of his handiwork. He says that the haircut is "ideal for a mature woman of substance".  I am wearing an Eddie Bauer Skyliner down jacket, a pleated skirt knitted by Gi-Bi in Venice, Italy, gloves by Sermoneta, stockings by National, and a pair of Himalayan Khombu boots.

©M-J de Mesterton, December 2011

Elegant Haircut, Elegant Winter Dressing

My husband describes the haircut he gives me as "the right cut for a woman of substance". Copyright M-J de Mesterton, Elegant Survival, 2011

Washing and Drying Your Shirts

By M-J de Mesterton, Copyright 2008

A well-made shirt can cost $500.00 or more. That is an investment to protect. Your shirts will last much longer if they are washed by hand and hung to dry. Don’t use so much detergent that it takes a rinsing marathon to remove it. “A little dab’ll do ya”, as the old Brylcreem jingle said. Ideally, one would hang shirts on a clothesline, upside down, with clothespins. This keeps pinch-marks off the important areas of your shirts. The sun will dry them in no time. Alternatively, one could hang them indoors, perhaps out-of-sight behind the the shower curtain, on hangers. A sturdy spring-rod, placed inside the shower area for the purpose of hanging clothes to dry will not interfere with your existing shower-rod. If you don’t want to get hanger-marks on the shoulders, just put wash-cloths under them, over the ends of your hanger. The worst thing to do, even if you wash your shirts in cold water in the gentle cycle, is to dry them in a machine–doing so will quickly degrade your shirt, which will die an angry death before its time. My husband and I have shirts from France and England that are twenty years old, and in perfect condition. An electric, energy-consuming dryer is an enemy to high-quality clothing. In fact, dryers shrink clothes and wear them out quickly; lint is composed of fibers that a machine robs from your clothes. You’d be surprised at how swiftly shirts dry naturally, and when they are just a wee bit damp, they’re easy to iron.

In cases of stubborn collar and cuff soil (I call it "cafe crud"), when hand-scrubbing fails, you can still wash your white shirts in hot water, soap, and a little bleach if necessary, as long as they are rinsed well, and then hung to dry. (Bleach alternative may be a better choice, if you can get it to work on stubborn stains.) Bleach is to be used only after stain-removal steps like soaking in Zote soap or Octagon (shirtmaker Alexander Kabbaz recommends Octagon for hand-washing his works of art) have been attempted without success. Always use as little bleach as possible, diluted before adding to wash-water, and only on white shirts. Bleach has a corrosive effect on your shirt’s fibers. The sun will do some natural bleaching of white cotton. Save costly energy and prolong the life of your shirts by hand-washing and sun-drying them. Giving your precious shirts to a dry-cleaner or other laundry service is wasteful. They crush buttons and machine-dry the poor things.

Do clothes hanging on a line outdoors conjure up bad images for you? Too bad, because it is one of life’s simple luxuries to be able to dry a beautiful, well-made shirt in the sun–some of the best people do it. Believe me, it’s not remotely infradig to care for your own shirts. After all, who cares for them more than you do? ~~Copyright M-J de Mesterton, May 2008

Recently, I wrote an editorial lamenting the sad state of women's voices. It is entitled, "Gals are Growling: What Gives?" In it, I recommend that today's women listen to yesterday's smooth-talking ladies in movies. Today's female voices often sound like trombones filled with cottage cheese, rather than like euphonious flutes. Listening to current newscasts, television shows and advertisements from American media will demonstrate this to the conscious listener, whereas in previous decades, women spoke without lowering their voices to gravelly, guttural levels. I've just begun to find examples of smooth-voiced, elegant women of the past. They appear on Elegant Survival Blog's Smooth Talkers page.

©M-J de Mesterton

New Page on Elegant Speech

by M-J de Mesterton:

Smooth-Talkers

A few words about what you see here at Elegant Survival: www.elegantsurvival.net is not a commercial website, thus its suffix is not .com but .net.  There are websites out there which came  after mine, with similar topics, the addresses of which end in .org, even though they are heavily-laden with advertisements. The internet frowns upon such misrepresentation, but they go ahead undeterred using web-addresses ending in ".org,"  a suffix that is reserved for non-profit entities. Elegant Survival occasionally recommends salutary products and clothing that I have tested myself, and those items which are produced by my friends. It is not a money-generating entity, and probably never shall be.

This site is not a blog, though there is a blog-page here, M-J's Mini-Blog, to which I occasionally contribute, as I am doing right now. Here at Elegant Survival you will find a series of pages that are static, difficult to edit and update, due to a rather unreliable hosting service that only works well under certain conditions. The content herein is written by and copyright M-J de Mesterton, with individual creation-dates of photos and articles included, except in rare cases. I will very occasionally feature material of others and give it proper attribution, because if it has already been said or written about, I will go straight to the source and feature the edifying piece rather than emulating it, since I do not engage in mimicry. When I first began publishing Elegant Survival, the very word, "elegant" had fallen into disuse, and there was so little content on the internet employing the term that just using the search-word, "elegant" brought up my site as the first result. Last year, both in print and on the George Noory radio show Coast to Coast a.m., prognosticator and Elegant Survival reader Gerald Celente made one of his famous predictions, to wit that elegance was going to make a comeback, especially the kind that doesn't rely upon wasteful expenditure of cash. Felicitously, he was correct, and now elegance is being brandished over the airwaves and internet like never before. Tweed, which I have been writing about since 2005, is also experiencing a resurgence in popularity, because it is not only luxurious but durable--just the sort of stylish, traditional and practical thing that exemplifies the Elegant Survival theme.

Because of their relatively easy hosting and posting qualities, I have branched-out to blog at Wordpress and Blogspot. Blogs are not to be confused with public forums or  forae; they were not originally intended as places where anonymous web-surfers can contribute and comment, though these days some bloggers are allowing such potentially dodgy activity. I simply do not have the free hours required for addressing comments or removing spam and, by the same token, because of my lack of adequate time in which to respond, do not wish to ignore those who would make interesting or benevolent remarks.

A note about Wordpress, where I host Elegant Survival News: it has come to my attention that when one is  logged-into their own site, surreptitiously-placed advertisements generated by Wordpress do not appear, but to my horror, I noticed recently that when I was perusing the site without being logged-in, ads were showing up there within my posts. I was mortified, and never would have written my blog there had I known what they were doing behind my back. I then did some research, and saw that other Wordpress users had experienced the same embarrassing if not enraging epiphany--finding that the public has been seeing adverts on their blogs all along without their knowledge. Like them, if I wanted ads, I would employ one of the many services, and control exactly what is being touted on my site. The Elegant Survival News blog will probably remain standing,  dubious adverts and all, because it is regularly visited by people around the globe. However, my au courant posts are being written on a page hosted by Blogger, Elegant Survivalist.

Thank you for visiting Elegant Survival!

©M-J de Mesterton; September 30th, 2010

If you wear only classic clothing, it is bound to come back into fashion. This jacket, designed by M-J and Jacques de Mesterton, then executed flawlessly by Bookster U.K., has already been somewhat mimicked (not duplicated) by Dior for autumn 2010. M-J wears her Harris Tweed burnt orange equestrian jacket with Gun Club Check breeks, also made to measure by Bookster U.K.

1) My recipe for pogne de Romans is just under my bread-making photos, about halfway down the Elegant Cuisine page, listed at left.

2) A review of Hotel St. Francis, Santa Fe, appears on the Elegant Culture and Travel page, listed at left.

Interview with the Author, M-J de Mesterton

History Bytes

Vintage Photograph Hand-Coloured in Oil by M-J de Mesterton, 1979