THE EFFORTLESSNESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

lessons from a laissez-faire year in dressing

February always feels like a much more dignified time to start the year. I’m blessed to be surrounded by people who are also Anti January Start. I just wrapped up

Grace Clarke

’s planner, glued down my vision board (1 item already materialized!), gathered a pile for the tailor (separated by sweaters, darning, and regular), and treated our living space to a deep clean. If you’re in New York, Nashville, or Memphis, I am unequivocally team Team Clean. I’ve only lived in 100-year-old-dust-factory type apartments where you resign to the idea that your living space will always feel sort of dirty even though you stick to a cleaning schedule. I would usually say, “I don’t know what they did while I locked myself in my room in meetings for four hours!” but I don’t need to wonder, as they left behind a checklist. I swear the air is cleaner. The owner of Team Clean is also my hilarious friend Candace, and I will take any opportunity to support her small business.

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TO THE MEAT OF IT! My 2024 Lessons In Dressing and Discourse. It’s a long one. Skip to “January” to start with the monthly takeaways. [This letter contains All Fours spoilers].

BEING YOURSELF IS A ROUND THE CLOCK JOB, but do we always need to be clocked in?

The inefficacy of the Effortlessness Industrial Complex has always fascinated me. Last week, I spoke to Vogue Business about the maligned PROBLEM / SOLUTION dynamics that arise from our oft-misdirected pursuit of it. If my quotes never make it in, this is what I wanted to say.

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Societal lauding of effortlessness is not new. Thorstein Veblen famously criticized aspirations of conspicuous leisure in 1899. One could guess the modern obsession with EFFORTLESS STYLE (colloquially defined by casual, theoretically accessible items, albeit typically priced in the high 3 to 4-digit range) has grown legs because everyone is so overworked producing results for shareholders and experiencing unrelenting global crises that we are all too exhausted to consider donning anything but a sweater and jeans. Are we searching for The Row or The Tabula Rasa? I recall Brian Eno writing a passage in “UNTHINKABLE FUTURES” about future generations taking vacations in which you’re told what to do the whole time because making any decision for one’s self has become so exhausting. Sara Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo is one of my favorite pieces on desire, power, and the overwhelming state of consumption.

Then there’s the selling economy. Magazines report on effortless style like it’s some great unlock, but the psychological levers of this promise are old-hat. Consider the model-off-duty trope. Forget the grueling, often physically demanding, and psychologically abusive nature of the modeling industry (in which, statistically, only a slim portion will rise to the top). It’s about the model-off-duty look. Yet, a quick Google search challenges the merit of this "timeless" aspiration. What all of these off-duty models have in common is primarily that they are models, and also that even the most casual outfits are intentionally styled, typically with the pieces of the moment.

Depending on the year, we are all but one Twiggy peacoat/aviator sunglass/slub t-shirt/McQueen skinny scarf/Chloe boot/Celine tri-fold bag/tennis necklace/The Row wool coat away from having a job description devoid of any actual work, consisting of getting papped looking like a fresh-faced, smiling sex kitten in nothing but jeans and a sparkling, wrinkle-free white t-shirt while sipping coffee.

Then what is ‘effortless style’ a proxy for? Partially the torment of Western body politics, chromatophobia, and traditional beauty standards, but also positive or plainly human aspirations like the comfort of self-assuredness, a sense of belonging or shared experience in lonely times, streamlining the wardrobe to gain back time for creative pursuits, social engagements, or family, and of course, the dopamine rush of solution on the horizon. Being told what to do is always more immediately soothing than trying to find out for yourself.

JENNY HOLZER

Two years into content creation and one year into styling, things began to feel off-kilter. I figured I was helping people, not necessarily because of my reach, but because I was receiving DMs or messages from clients every day that told me so. Simultaneously, I received notes stressed not about the aesthetics of style, but the “right” process. The elusive effortlessness! Nirvana! I found myself managing a lot of self-imposed sartorial infighting over data-driven vs. vibe-based shopper, maximalism vs. minimalism, luxury vs. for-the-everyman, on-trend vs. esoteric, or capsule wardrobe vs. sprawling archive feels like a distraction made to keep us dissatisfied, instead of embracing the friction that propels us deeper into ourselves.

Enter Miranda July’s All Fours. In an interview, July is asked about her motivations for writing specific scenes, and said after she was done writing, she wondered if “[it’s] about making a home, a life for yourself that is so specific that it actually makes no sense to anyone else and doesn’t have to.” I immediately thought back to Leandra Medine’s essay on mimesis, momentum, and as she put it, The Collective Taste. This led me to wonder if The Collective Process is just as loaded.

The zeitgeist seems to be shifting toward the intellectual, heralding the Literary Hot Girl over the plain-old “Influencer”, but the game of Say’s Law that ensues is not without problems. I found myself running out of ASSURANCES and LESSONS and NEAT EXPECTATIONS because process is only the story you can tell after something has happened. And nothing happens when you’re engineering everything within an inch of its life, always looking over your shoulder and letting heat out of the oven.

I was tired of optimizing everything and started to wonder what would happen if I didn’t. Attempting effortlessness by employing it semi-literally? Here’s some of what I learned, and if you’re nosy, (almost) everything I wore last year.