What constitutes elegant company in the 21st century?

Browsing through a Christie’s catalogue, I came across the description of a pen-and-wash drawing by Rowlandson, c. 1800, ‘Elegant company in a park’. It set me thinking. One knows very well what was meant by ‘elegant company’ at the beginning of the 19th century. It applied perfectly to the party Mr Bingley brings to the Merryton dance in Chapter Three of Pride and Prejudice. He himself is ‘good-looking and gentlemanlike’ with ‘easy, unaffected manners’ and £100,000. His two sisters each have £30,000 and ‘an air of decided fashion’, though one is married to a ‘Mr Hurst, [who] merely looked the gentleman’. But his mediocrity is more than compensated by Bingley’s friend Darcy, who is not just fine, tall and handsome but has ‘a noble mien’ and £10,000 a year. Altogether ‘elegant company’.

Jane Austen’s clarity on such a point is given added definition by her insistence on what constituted the reverse of elegance in the shape of Mrs Elton.