Why are we all obsessed with effortless style?

It's ok to make an effort

What is “effortless style”? Justice Potter Stewart’s quote “I know it when I see it” accurately describes it. Effortless style is hard to define, it’s ambiguous, and even though it can’t be defined, it is deemed the highest of compliments. Effortless style “implies that style runs through your veins, rather than something you paid through the nose for on Bond Street.” It’s about the way the pieces are paired together to create the full outfit versus any one individual piece. When I think of effortless style, Kate Moss, Alexa Chung, french influencers come to mind. There is a nonchalance to the looks, a devil may care attitude. Caring about how you dress is the antidote to effortless style. But why when it comes to style is caring a bad thing?

Our fascination with effortless style is because it’s hard to imitate. The outfits lack rhyme or reason and they aren’t replicable. There is no formula to follow and it can be minimalistic. There are times when someone who has effortless style wears something that if anyone else tried to wear the same pieces they’d look absolutely insane, so why does it work when they wear it?

Some of it is the way they style them, leaving a shirt untucked, a button undone somewhere, a scarf on a jaunty angle, there is always an element that is slightly unexpected that gives the effortless impression.

For a long time, I wanted to have an effortless style, I’d just throw together an outfit willy-nilly, but often the outfits felt flat and boring. Now I definitely make an effort getting dressed, I’m not embarrassed to admit it. On Sunday evenings, I plan all my outfits for the work week. While I may not end up wearing these outfits as planned, it helps having a framework when getting dressed everyday. I’ve been doing this for almost a year now and it makes the mornings easier and I find my outfits generally better because I’ve been able to give more thought and consideration to them than if I spend eight minutes staring in front of my closet trying to figure out what to wear and then just end up wearing a button down and a slip skirt with loafers…again.

Effortless style and the no make-up look to me exist in the same world as unicorns and mermaids, nice in theory, but don’t really exist. For effortless style and no make-up to work then the effort exists somewhere, it just can’t be obvious.

Effortless style can exist when a closet is constantly being refined and a person has a strong sense of what looks good on them and what they like. This doesn’t happen overnight, but rather takes time and constantly deciding what does and doesn’t work for them. It’s a constant process that takes “surprise!” effort. The no makeup look requires flawless skin, full eyebrows, and long eyelashes. The pieces have to be strong to make the whole look worth it.

The fixation with effortless style is funny to me because people generally take pride in their work. There are entire apps built around showing others your work and accomplishments, look at Goodreads, Strava, Linkedin. When people put effort into something, they want to broadcast so others know. Yet when we get dressed we want people to think “oh this old outfit, I just threw it together!”

The opposite of effortless is contrived and that to me is probably the meanest insult you could say about one’s outfit. A contrived look is one that seems overly styled, too accessorized, too perfect. I often describe it as looking like you stepped out of a J.Crew mid 2010’s catalogue.

So obviously there is a healthy balance to being absolutely effortless where you dress like a teenage boy wearing whatever clothes don’t have stains and/or smell, versus so styled, one has to wonder if you picked out your own clothes or just copied what a mannequin is wearing. But why do we skew to want to be effortless?

I have two prevailing theories. The first is that we’re slightly embarrassed by putting work into our style. It feels frivolous and vain to put effort into our appearance. We don't want to admit that our appearance is the easiest way for us to signal to others how we feel, what we like, and who we are. If we admit that, we try with our clothes and looks it seems as devaluing to other attributes to other qualities we’re supposed to hold in higher regard, like compassion or intelligence.

My second theory is that the people we worship for having effortless style, like Kate Moss, Zoe Kravitz, Jane Birkin, all possess an attitude of “I don’t really care what others think about me” that goes beyond what they wear. I imagine if they were all wearing brown bags like the paperbag princess we would still think that about them. This is a result of their personality, not their clothes. We hope that if we imitate their style we may also be able to imitate their carefree and confident attitudes. I’m not sure if either of these are right, but I am going to unabashedly admit I make an effort with my style and that is okay. As Chloe Malle said, “Good effortless style has a lot of effort…there should be some effort.”