By Jussara Da Silva
There is something slightly strange about the way we talk about style today. We care enormously about clothes, perhaps more visibly than ever, and yet at the same time there seems to be an unspoken rule that nobody should look as though they care too much. The best outfit is effortless. The best hair is effortless. The best makeup looks as though almost nothing was done. The perfect handbag is casually placed over the shoulder, the shirt is slightly undone, the coat is thrown on rather than carefully styled, and the entire person is supposed to give the impression that she simply woke up looking this way. Even outfits that have clearly required enormous thought are often praised for appearing as though they required none at all. We admire someone and say, She makes it look so effortless, as though effort would somehow diminish the beauty of what we are looking at. I understand the appeal. There is something incredibly elegant about ease, and there are few things less appealing than an outfit that seems uncomfortable or completely disconnected from the person wearing it. But somewhere along the way I think we confused ease with the absence of intention, and intention with trying too hard. We became strangely embarrassed by the possibility that someone might discover we had actually thought about what we were wearing. And I keep coming back to one very simple question: when did effort become embarrassing?
Some of the most beautiful things about fashion exist precisely because they are unnecessary. We don’t need an extraordinary pair of earrings. We don’t need silk scarves, brooches, evening bags, beautifully constructed coats, perfume bottles sitting on dressing tables, gloves in different colors, shoes chosen specifically because they make an outfit feel complete, or a handbag that makes absolutely no practical sense but somehow changes the entire way we feel when carrying it. Human beings could dress entirely for function and life would continue perfectly well, but we don’t. Across centuries and cultures, people have decorated themselves. We have embroidered fabric, shaped silhouettes, polished shoes, painted faces, curled hair, worn jewelry and created rituals around getting ready. There is something deeply human about taking what is necessary—clothing the body—and turning it into something expressive. That is partly what makes fashion so fascinating. We take an ordinary requirement of daily life and give it meaning. We use it to communicate identity, culture, mood, aspiration, belonging, rebellion, memory and sometimes simply beauty. Yet in a culture increasingly fascinated by effortlessness, we occasionally behave as though admitting that we enjoy any of this too much makes us superficial. I don’t think it does. Sometimes you spend twenty minutes deciding between two pairs of earrings not because your identity depends on which pair you choose, but because you enjoy choosing the earrings.
I think there is an important distinction here that we rarely make: there is a difference between dressing for approval and dressing with intention. From the outside, they can occasionally look exactly the same, but psychologically they are completely different experiences. Dressing for approval begins with an audience. What will they think? Will they like this? Will they understand it? Does this make me look successful enough, fashionable enough, sophisticated enough, attractive enough? Dressing with intention begins somewhere much quieter. How do I want to feel today? What proportions do I want to create? Which bag makes this coat make sense? Do I prefer the gold earrings or the silver ones? Is something missing? Is there too much happening? One is primarily concerned with being interpreted correctly; the other is simply the pleasure of making choices. Of course, none of us exists completely outside other people’s opinions, and fashion has always been social. We dress knowing that we will be seen. But caring about how you present yourself does not automatically mean you are desperate for validation. Planning an outfit does not mean you lack confidence. Loving beautiful clothes does not mean you are shallow. Being interested in your appearance does not mean there is nothing deeper happening inside you. Sometimes the explanation is far simpler: you like getting dressed.
Perhaps we have become suspicious of effort because contemporary culture has made effortlessness into a kind of status symbol. The person who appears to have everything without appearing to work for any of it possesses a particular kind of mystique. Her clothes fit perfectly, but apparently she doesn’t think about clothes. Her home is beautiful, but somehow nothing looks deliberately arranged. Her hair falls perfectly, but she supposedly did almost nothing to it. Her wardrobe contains exactly the right pieces, yet she appears completely uninterested in trends. There is something seductive about this image because effortlessness communicates confidence. It suggests abundance without anxiety. But there is also something slightly impossible about it. Behind many things that look effortless is enormous effort. A beautifully simple room may have taken months to design. A perfectly cut coat may contain hundreds of hours of craftsmanship. A seemingly uncomplicated outfit may work because the person wearing it spent years understanding proportion, color, fabric and what suits her. Simplicity is often the result of editing rather than indifference. The white shirt and trousers may look obvious when you see them together, but choosing exactly the right white shirt, exactly the right trouser shape, exactly the right shoe and exactly the right amount of jewelry is still a creative decision. Simplicity and effortlessness are not the same thing.
This is why I don’t want this conversation to become an argument against minimalism, quiet dressing or restraint. I love restraint. I think some of the most sophisticated outfits are extraordinarily simple. A beautiful coat over a fine knit with trousers and an excellent bag can say everything it needs to say. Someone may genuinely feel happiest in a white shirt, jeans and loafers for the rest of her life, and there is no reason she should add more simply because someone tells her fashion is supposed to be playful. But simplicity chosen because you genuinely love simplicity is very different from simplicity chosen because you are frightened of appearing as though you tried. In the same way, maximalism chosen because you love decoration is very different from maximalism performed simply because you want attention. The number of things someone is wearing tells us very little about the intention behind them. A minimal outfit can be deeply considered. An elaborate outfit can feel completely natural to the person wearing it. Style begins to become interesting when we stop using the amount of visible effort as evidence of whether something is sophisticated.
Sometimes I think about childhood when considering this because children often have an entirely different relationship with getting dressed before they learn all the social rules surrounding it. A child can see a ridiculous pair of sparkling shoes and simply think, I love those. She doesn’t immediately calculate whether they align with her established personal brand. She doesn’t wonder whether metallic shoes peaked two seasons ago. She doesn’t ask whether people will think she is trying too hard. If she wants the glittery shoes and the pink bag and the strange hat simultaneously, she may very well put all three on and walk into the world completely satisfied with herself. Of course, adulthood requires discernment, and developing taste often means learning how to edit. I am certainly not suggesting that sophistication requires us to dress exactly as we did when we were six years old. But there is something in that instinct worth protecting: the ability to experience fashion before immediately observing ourselves experiencing it. At some point, many of us stop simply asking Do I like this? and begin watching ourselves from the outside. Is this too much? Am I overdressed? Will people think I’m trying? Does this look cool enough? Is everyone else going to be more casual? We become both the person getting dressed and an imaginary stranger judging the person getting dressed, and that second person can become incredibly loud.
The fear of being overdressed is particularly interesting to me because being underdressed is often treated as accidental while being overdressed can feel intentional, and intention exposes us. Arriving somewhere wearing something beautiful when everyone else is casual makes it obvious that you made a decision. You cared. You tried. And for some reason that vulnerability can feel more uncomfortable than arriving as though you barely thought about it. We have all probably experienced that moment of standing in front of a mirror and removing something we genuinely liked because we suddenly wondered whether it was “too much.” Sometimes editing is absolutely the right decision; good styling requires knowing when an outfit has enough. But sometimes “too much” doesn’t actually mean aesthetically too much. Sometimes it means too visible. Too deliberate. Too obvious that we wanted to look beautiful. And I think those are very different things.
Fashion history itself becomes almost impossible to understand if we remove the pleasure of effort. Think about how much of what we now admire required people to care enormously. Couture is essentially the celebration of effort. Embroidery that takes hundreds of hours, garments constructed almost impossibly by hand, fittings repeated until a silhouette sits exactly as intended—none of this is effortless. A fashion show that transports an audience into another universe is not effortless. A great editorial photograph is not effortless. A beautifully designed handbag is not effortless. Even the supposedly effortless white T-shirt may have gone through endless decisions about fabric weight, neckline, shoulder placement and proportion before arriving on a rail. We celebrate effort when it is hidden inside the product, yet sometimes become embarrassed by effort when it is visible in the person enjoying that product. I find that contradiction fascinating. We want the seamstress to care. We want the designer to care. We want the photographer, stylist, architect, chef, florist and artist to care. Why should the woman getting dressed be the only person expected to pretend she doesn’t?
Perhaps this is also why certain older photographs of people going to dinner, the theatre, traveling or simply walking through cities can feel so captivating. It isn’t necessarily because everyone dressed “better” before, and I think romanticizing the past too much can become lazy. Every era had ordinary clothes, bad clothes and people who couldn’t care less about fashion. But there are moments in old photographs where you can sense that getting dressed was understood as part of the occasion. The coat mattered. The shoes mattered. The handbag mattered. The finishing touches mattered. The act of preparing yourself was part of leaving the house. Today we have gained something wonderful in the enormous freedom to dress casually almost anywhere, and I would never want to lose that freedom. Comfort has expanded what fashion can be, and many old dress codes were unnecessarily restrictive. But freedom should work in both directions. The freedom to dress casually should also include the freedom to dress beautifully without needing to apologize for it. We shouldn’t replace one rigid dress code with another where looking as though you tried becomes the new social mistake.
There is also something intimate about the ritual of getting ready that has very little to do with what happens once you leave the house. Perhaps this is the part we overlook most. You can enjoy fashion even when nobody is watching. There is pleasure in opening a wardrobe in the morning and considering what the day might require. There is pleasure in putting on music while getting ready, choosing perfume, fastening a watch, changing your mind about the shoes, putting your hair up and then taking it down again, deciding that the jacket makes the outfit too serious, adding a scarf and immediately removing it, realizing that the bag you originally chose is wrong and reaching for another. None of these tiny decisions need to be important. That is precisely their charm. Life contains enough decisions with consequences. Sometimes choosing between two handbags can simply be choosing between two handbags. We don’t need to turn every interest into a philosophical statement to justify enjoying it. Fashion can carry extraordinary cultural meaning, but it can also exist at the level of everyday pleasure.
And perhaps that is what I want to protect most: pleasure without justification. We have become very good at explaining why fashion matters. We talk about identity, politics, economics, culture, craftsmanship, psychology, sustainability, status, history and artistic expression, and all of those conversations deserve to exist. GTWJ itself is built around taking fashion seriously enough to explore those deeper questions. But taking fashion seriously does not mean we have to experience it seriously all the time. Sometimes a dress is wonderful because it moves beautifully when you walk. Sometimes you want the handbag because the color makes you happy. Sometimes you put on the earrings because the outfit looked boring without them. Sometimes you buy the strange shoe because every time you see it you smile. Fashion does not always need a defense. Beauty does not always need a thesis.
This is also where I think personal style becomes far more enjoyable. When we remove the pressure to perform effortlessness, we give ourselves permission to experiment again. Maybe you try something and it doesn’t work. Fine. Maybe you wear an outfit that photographs beautifully but feels completely wrong by lunchtime. Fine. Maybe you buy a scarf and spend six months trying to understand how you actually want to wear it. Maybe you suddenly discover that a color you avoided for years looks wonderful on you. Maybe you become obsessed with brooches for one winter and barely touch them the next. Not every styling experiment needs to become part of your permanent identity. We are allowed to play. In fact, I think people with strong personal style often become strong precisely because they have experimented enough to understand what they want to keep. Restraint becomes meaningful when it comes after curiosity. Otherwise, it can simply become fear disguised as sophistication.
There is a wonderful confidence in someone who can enjoy dressing up without needing everyone around her to understand why. She doesn’t necessarily wear more. She doesn’t necessarily buy more. She simply isn’t embarrassed by her own attention. If she wants to wear the beautiful coat to lunch, she wears it. If she prefers jeans and a knit to dinner, she wears that. The point is not formality. The point is ownership. She isn’t constantly negotiating between what she likes and how little effort she needs to appear to have made. There is ease in that too, but it is a different kind of ease. Not the carefully manufactured appearance of not caring, but the genuine ease that comes from no longer being ashamed that you do.
Maybe this is what elegance actually is. Not pretending that everything happened accidentally. Not making ourselves smaller so nobody can accuse us of trying. Not performing indifference toward things we genuinely enjoy. Maybe elegance is knowing exactly why you made the choices you made and not needing to explain them. A simple outfit can contain that elegance. So can an extraordinary evening dress. So can the same handbag you’ve carried for ten years. So can the ridiculous shoes you bought last month simply because you couldn’t stop thinking about them. The common thread isn’t how much effort went into the outfit. It is whether the person inside it feels present.
Tomorrow morning, you may put on the simplest outfit you own. You may spend two minutes getting dressed. You may spend forty. You may wear an enormous pair of earrings with an otherwise quiet outfit. You may reach for the handbag everyone is currently talking about, or the one everyone stopped talking about five years ago. You may carefully plan every element, or you may genuinely throw something on and discover that it works perfectly. None of those things determine whether you have style. But I hope somewhere between opening your wardrobe and walking out the door, there is still a little pleasure left in the ritual. I hope fashion doesn’t become another thing we have to perform correctly. I hope we can continue analyzing it, questioning it, studying its history and understanding why certain things work, while still leaving enough room for the wonderfully unserious moment of standing in front of a mirror and thinking, I really like this. Because fashion can carry history, identity, psychology, status, craftsmanship, culture and art. It can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and the world we inhabit. We can take all of that seriously—and I think we should. But sometimes, getting dressed is allowed to be fun.
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