Easy Reading is Hard Writing (except when it isn't)...

... but hard looking can help

Over on Threads, my eye was caught by this comment, by sustainable fashion commentator Aja Barber:

Probably an unpopular opinion but effortless style doesn't actually exist … When people comment that models and actors have effortless style, I'm thinking ‘no shit’. Models get PAID to wear clothing for their job. They're good at it. Actors can afford the best of the best and many employ stylists. Don't fall for that con. It's either your job or it takes work and if it's your job, you work at it.

My first thought was, ‘Yep, true - most of the time’. After all, most actors can’t afford the best of the best, but their chief professional skill is to present themselves as the part requires, including the part of Effortlessly Stylish Actor. If someone’s looking super-stylish without apparently having had to work at it, then there was still plenty of effort involved, it just happened earlier: in the seeking, buying and combining of clothes, the hair-cut-and-colour bespeaking, the casual-button-undoing, the coat-slung-over-shouldering, and so on. Or, of course, in the money-earning that means you can afford a stylist.

Sure, it probably comes more naturally to some of us than others - and it’s easier to seem at effortlessly at ease once you’re confident everything about your appearance is just dandy - but there’s still work at some point. Then into my head popped the saying easy reading is hard writing, along with the fact that actors who play, for example, light comedy, rarely get the credit (or the Oscars) they deserve, which instead go to actors in heavier roles which more obviously took research and preparation. The art which conceals art is, by definition, not easy to spot at work.