Fashion's most persistent lie
Why is it to hard to admit that we care?
TL;DR: Effortlessness is perhaps the most persistent and damaging myth in all of consumer culture. Because it's about maintaining impossible standards, obscuring the work involved, and creating shame around trying ‘too hard’.
So many fashion icons, from Jane Birkin to Kate Moss, Zoë Kravitz, Camille Rowe or the Olsens, are revered for their lack of effort…their thrift-shop finds and undone hair, their nonchalance and disregard, their seeming unstudied ambivalence to the very thing they’ve mastered.
See also the whole model off-duty thing, no make-up makeup, and the French Girl industrial complex. Which is not really about nationality, it's about fantasy of someone who inherently knows, who doesn't have to strive or study or refer to the formulas or wardrobe systems or hacks or styling methods that fill our feeds.
An invisible system of unspoken rules
Celebrating - or maybe just being impressed by - effortlessness is part of a much broader cultural mythology.
Everyone’s trying to make hard things look easy. Whether it's a CEO claiming to function on four hours of sleep, a musician who likes people to think they spend more time at the party than in the studio, or a duchess just throwing together a seven-layered fruit rainbow before school…we're surrounded by high status people effort-masking.
The psychology is clear: if you're finding this thing hard that I seem to find easy, it must be because you lack my innate, instinctive natural ability.
If they won’t acknowledge the work that goes in, neither must we.
That creates an infernal double bind.
We’re exhausting ourselves with the trying while feeling hopelessly gauche for needing to.
But the thing is, when confronted with actual effortlessness a lot of us seem a bit uncomfortable
Did you see Pamela Anderson at the Met Gala last week?
She’s appeared make-up-less at lots of fashion events in recent months, but the Met Gala exposed her face (literally) to a much wider audience.
Her bare, unfiltered face, in the sea of painstakingly-contoured perfection, shocked the internet. A lot of people didn't seem to know how to process it.
The (many) reactions I saw ranged from joy, to confusion, to praise for her bravery (as if not wearing make-up is an act of courage), to side-eyed faux concern about whether she was okay. Which I don’t think was all just plain old ageism. Lorde received a similar a reaction to her deliberately-minimally made-up face.
It reminded me of the years-long media commentary about the Olsens’ style. For years their strain of effortlessness has left parts of the mainstream media completely, utterly baffled (In Touch, 2018), about them looking homeless (The Cut 2009) or like they got dressed from a dumpster (Town+Country, 2020).
Pierre Bourdieu would have a field day with it all (he did, in his day, in Distinction).
The effortlessness lie
But of course it’s an illusion. The truth is that anyone’s air of effortlessness is the result of years of iterative, cumulative work and investment.
That effortlessly stylish celebrity…they (or their team) most possess a studied understanding of visual culture, social norms, appropriateness, trends, history etc; they probably continually consume a lot of visual references; and create the time, financial capital and cultural capital to allow them to understand what to buy and how to wear it; they probably take care of their clothes, invest consistently, and have ongoing discipline and commitment to maintaining their appearance. Perhaps they have engineered their lives (or had the privilege) to live in an environment where the ‘right’ way to dress, speak, or move through the world doesn’t need to be so consciously learned.
The effortlessness is nurtured. It’s the interest on their investment.
(Much like the high maintenance things I do to be low maintenance memes doing the rounds in recent months).
Fashion's effortlessness myth is, like so much of capitalist consumer culture, about status and striving. It turns fashion into an insecurity engine that runs on shame and self-doubt (two things capitalism loves), because it rewards those who have cultural capital and punishes those who don’t.
That’s why it’s so hard to admit that we care.
Thanks for reading/see you next time.
Beth
It’s weird to me the reaction you describe to Pamela A. (Ive been off-line and didn't witness it myself)
For one thing, it looks like she is wearing make-up . Id say she has some foundation or tinted moisturizer , plus blush , lipstick , eyebrow pencil…
What she doesn't have are fake plastic eyelashes . Or “lash extensions“. And no heavy eye makeup or mascara.
That we are so used to women wearing fake eyelashes and heavy makeup that people are scandalized by a light make up job is truly weird.
As for the value of nonchalance… maybe its hard to be unselfconscious in the online era . But it is possible . If you get a chance go through a phase where you dont look in mirrors . It can feel great .