Elegant as flowers

“Consider how the lilies of the field grow: they neither labour nor spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon, in all his glory, was dressed like one of them.”
— Matthew 6:28–29

Solomon had weavers, dyers, the gold of Ophir. The lily has nothing. It grows wherever it happens to, at the edge of a path, and it outdoes the richest king of his time without lifting a finger.

Two thousand years later we are still weaving and spinning. We do it at an industrial pace. One season decides that a colour is beautiful, the next declares it dead, and what we wanted to wear yesterday ends up at the bottom of a drawer or in a bale of rags bound for the other side of the world. Beauty, like this, comes with an expiry date stamped on it. You buy it, you show it off, you throw it away. You start again.

Not the flower.

The red of a poppy never goes out of fashion because it was never in fashion. It was already perfect in the frescoes of Knossos, in Persian carpets knotted thread by thread, in Flemish still lifes where painters brought together species that in reality never bloom in the same month, simply for the pleasure of having them all. It was perfect in Chinese vases, in the ikebana that measures the emptiness around a single stem. Cultures that never spoke to one another looked at the same corolla and felt the same thing.

That is the point. Fashion ages because it lives on comparison: it holds value only until someone else has something new. The flower compares itself to nothing. Its elegance asks no permission from the taste of the moment, and for that reason it does not fear it.

Then it withers, of course. It lasts only a few days. But it is a transience different from that of the discarded garment: the flower does not go out of fashion, it simply ends, and the following year it returns identical to itself. While we chase the next thing that will seem beautiful to us, it stays fixed on the same beauty as always.

Elegant as flowers means this. Not better dressed. Dressed to last.