Piss Elegant!

That's when you wear your diamond-studded cock ring to piss.

Anthony Blanche.

A self-conscious fixation on "fanciness" that is actually quite tacky.

Joan Didion described Nancy Reagan's aesthetic as "piss elegance" in one of her typically devastating essays.

Gold spray painted chandeliers.

Used a lot in Aussie and New Zealand in days gone by...not sure now.

Yeah, it's probably a failed attempt to look upper class.

Thanks, R2, for that amble down Memory Lane. Nicholas Grice was spectacular.

New Chanel handbag proudly displayed amidst IKEA furnishings

"We had dinner at Greg's. The food was okay, but his decor - talk about piss elegant!"

[quote] "We had dinner at Greg's. The food was okay, but his decor - talk about piss elegant!"

My decor is hardly “piss elegant.”

But thanks for coming.

I don't think of Anthony Blanche as being Piss Elegant. He was High Camp. That's an entirely other thing.

The Trumps. All of them

Hear hear, R11. I always thought Anthony Blanche, Cara and Charles’ cheerfully bitchy father were the only characters in Brideshead Revisited who weren’t, fundamentally, tacky, self-indulgent drama queens.

In fact, I’d call Brideshead Revisited an exercise in piss elegance - if you want to write apologetics on Catholicism just get on with it already.

Nicolas Fairford is a good and fairly obvious recent DL example of piss elegance.

Dump has perfected piss elegance.

White trash with money.

Every culture has its form of piss elegance, R16. Atlanta is such an amusing place because it is full of white piss elegance and Black piss elegance chugging along next to each other.

The piss elegant queen who wrote Crazy Rich Asians is a good example of the sort of piss elegance Chinese people go in for.

I fucking HATE that fucking book.

[quote]piss elegant in American English -- 'adjective. Slang. displaying a contrived, often pretentious, sophistication, opulence, etc.' [Collins Dictionary]

The definition above lacks the something that makes it popular (once at least) in gay slang. Trump might fit the definition above, but to my mind Trump's piss elegance, if you want to call it that, is more bluster than pretension. There's nothing sophisticated about the man, nor does he seem to aspire to sophistication or opulence -- to bragging rights and strings of superlatives, yes, but not to any substance or station beyond having blown a wad of money on something.

I first heard 'piss elegance' at age 17 in college in the late 1970s. I think the first time was among some older straight friends describing an impossibly fussy and pretentious gay acquaintance who put on very grand airs. Not long after I started hearing it from older gay men as a cut to the pretension of their acquaintances. I recall two men describing a mutual acquaintance who was obsessed with Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII and who entertained with his 'Wallis and Edward china.' He was piss elegant because he was so grand about his very dubiously provenanced tea set for which he had overpaid and was visibly jittery and uncomfortable using -- and alternately too proud. The implication: if you have to have pedigreed things, you mustn't make a big fuss and become a slave to them, or worse, the wrong sort of braggart too ignorant to know that he had been duped.

It's where you hold your dick with your pinkie finger out.

I agree that Trump is too Stanley Kowalski on a gold toilet to be piss elegant.

Barbra’s My Passion for Design is piss elegance.

Aaron Schock’s Downton Abbey-inspired office is piss elegance.

Oprah’s Legends Ball luncheon is piss elegance.

Hyacinth Bucket is the epitome of piss elegance.

And Nicolas Fairford.

Alan McCarthy - and don't hold the mayo!

"Screw you, honey. Boy, if there's one thing I can't stand it's a queen without a sense of humor. You can die with your secret... miserable piss-elegant fairy."

Madonna's British Mistress of the Manor period. Beyoncé and Jay-Z take over of the Louvre. For the latter you need to put on your Black Piss Elegance filters, mentioned above, or you'll be blinded by the tacky vulgarity.

Beyonce and her side-ponytail. Beyonce: that is not elegant.

Whenever I hear someone start a sentence with “A gentleman/lady never (or sometimes always) …” I think piss elegant. The odd part is I think that especially if the speaker is gay. It’s so quueny-critical, always trying to be the arbiter of taste. I used to hear this a lot in the early 80s from the generation just older than my cohort of gaylings.

Well in the 1980s there were many gay men of a certain age who were Piss Elegant working in art dealing, museums, cultural philanthropy and the carriage trade professions - decoration, fashion, hair, catering, flowers, etc. Harmless and God Bless the ones who survived AIDS.

Sally Quinn is a better example of piss elegance than Donald Trump, right?

R2, you leave Antoine alone!

R30, I don't know enough about Quinn to say. She wasn't, though, a country rube rolled out of the cabbage patch to a big house in Georgetown As I recall she could be imperious and a first-order bitch, and she committed a fair share of social gaffes, but I can't think of any examples of piss elegance -- not saying that she wasn't, mind you.

For me there's an element of nervousness in piss elegance. As when people blab too much about how important the artwork on their walls is only to betray a fundamental insecurity, when instead of dinner conversation they speak too long about how the entree is the favorite in some swank watering hole.

But maybe she was

In my own interpretation

We had a thread a while back about a badly restored Victorian Mansion and the two insufferable queens who owned it.

That, to me, is piss-elegance.

R32, I remember reading an article about her where the writer made note of the (I think dining room?) wallpaper that she had commissioned and featured her, Ben Bradlee and their son in various 18th century vignettes and thinking that was some beyond piss elegant bullshit.

Geraldine Page in “Pete ‘n’ Tillie”— the way she pronounces “Monaco.”

Just about any wedding reception these days is a piss elegant affair.

The Met Gala is piss elegance.

Silicon Valley excess is piss elegance.

Those are too expensive and decadent to be piss elegant, R37 and R38.

Piss elegant involves the clutching of pearls and the invocation of great ladies who died at least 60 years ago and wouldn't give a flying fuck about whatever trivial detail it is they are supposed to have always done.

Why R18? Is it boring or ridiculous or what?

Piss elegant was a popular term when I lived in the Bay Area in the early70s. It was so frequently used that there were invented variations. A friend told me then that my new luggage "pees gallons."

R40, it's absurd and the characters are paper-thin. The first chapter has a rich Asian harpy being denied a room by a racist British hotel clerk. She buys the hotel and fires him. Because, you know, rich.

There are so many ways none of the scene would have happened that after page ten I gave up trying to think I was going to learn anything about people, whether rich, Asian, crazy or some combination of the three.

[quote] wallpaper that she had commissioned and featured her, Ben Bradlee and their son in various 18th century vignettes and thinking that was some beyond piss elegant bullshit.

That's not piss-elegant; just plain tacky and vulgar.

Not to be confused with "pissant."

An even more fabulous and more fancy/desirable description to use instead of "piss elegant" is pisswoir. It rooted in the beautiful French language. It's pronounced with a slight accent, like when saying amoir (the French upright cabinet). "Her Versace sheets were so pisswoir!"

Is it actually a French term, R45? Because otherwise, it sounds a bit piss elegant itself...

No it is not a fresh word. Pissoir is a urinal however.

a FRENCH word...

Alan McCarthy: “that piss elegant Cooze!”

Pee on me.

So in a sense, could Hyacinth Bucket be described as "piss elegant."

Behold...

That's menstrual piss elegant, R52!

R51 Hyacinth's candlelight suppers were aspirational elegant but she is such an insufferable, anxious, and deluded try hard ne'er-do-well nothing is ever piss elegant about Hyacinth. Piss elegance has a certain insouciance. The creator of piss elegance is fully convinced elegance has been achieved and is charmingly content with the look.