Making it Look Easy

Can you spend too much time perfecting your look? Yep. I'm talking about seeming "fussy" -- something you want to avoid.

A large part of appearing stylishly elegant is dressing the part, and a large part of dressing stylishly elegant is making it look easy and unrushed.

In other words, don't make it look as if you've just spent hours fiddling with your shirt cuff to get it extending exactly one half-inch beyond your jacket cuff. That bow tie (if you're the sort that wears them -- more on that at some other time) doesn't need to be perfect. Your clothes should be clean and neatly pressed -- but they shouldn't look as if they were purloined from the window at Saks just before you came to work today. Wear the clothes, not the other way around. Even in formalwear, you don't need to look formal. You dig?

Here's a nifty rule of thumb. If any of these phrases come to mind while looking in the mirror, rethink your look: wooden, stilted, firing squad, full dress parade, vertebrae fusion.

An excerpt from an old New York Magazine interview with Tom Ford:

"You can put a Frenchman and an American man in the same outfit, stand them next to each other, and you’ll still see a difference; you’ll see it in the way the Frenchman stands, the way his tie is tied. I’ve been in trouble before for saying that Americans are too perfect in their approach to dressing, but Americans are descended from Puritans, and sometimes that comes through in their style. To have too much style is looked down upon in America, whereas for the French it is something to be celebrated."