{"id":513,"date":"2026-06-11T16:48:56","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T16:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=513"},"modified":"2026-06-11T16:48:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T16:48:56","slug":"the-work-that-goes-into-effortless-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=513","title":{"rendered":"The Work That Goes Into \u2018Effortless\u2019 Style"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twice a year, every January and June, certain corners of the internet populate with photographs of extravagantly dressed men on the streets of Florence. These are the peacocks of Pitti Uomo, a Tuscan menswear trade show, flashing their plumage: fabrics in textures found nowhere in nature, jacket lapels large enough to verge on parody, ties knotted so elaborately that they would dazzle a longshoreman. Their displays are sometimes held up as examples of sprezzatura, a kind of nonchalant disregard for the rules of fashion. This belief underwrites the common myth that true style is effortless, a form of expression that arises from indifference rather than care.<\/p>

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And yet, more likely than not, any man attending Pitti Uomo has spent the past six months planning exactly what he was going to wear on any given day of the show\u2014the belt that would hang too long, the patterns that would clash just so. The attendees are stylish, to be sure, but they also demonstrate that style is entirely compatible with effort\u2014not so much an outpouring of the self as a result of the work that inevitably goes into producing that self.<\/p>

I thought about this distinction often while reading Andrew Sean Greer\u2019s witty and, yes, stylish new novel, Villa Coco<\/i>, much of which takes place in the countryside surrounding Florence, a wilderness populated as much by eccentric expats as by rampaging wild boar and trundling porcupines. Greer, whose novel Less<\/i>was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, here tells the story of a young man, our narrator, who travels to Italy in the early 1990s. He\u2019s been hired by an elderly but vivacious baronessa<\/i> to catalog the contents of her home for opaque reasons. The archivist arrives in Italy as stuffy as a nose in November, unflatteringly calling himself \u201ca cable-knit sweater over a cable-knit heart,\u201d in Greer\u2019s characteristically evocative phrasing. As he gradually learns, properly becoming yourself in many cases begins with the emulation of others\u2014those who know, for instance, when to leave their tie at home, or where to purchase red-velvet slippers that \u201cmake you feel like the pope,\u201d or why one must never, ever place a hat on the bed.<\/p>

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Villa Coco: A Novel<\/div>
By Greer, Andrew Sean<\/div><\/div>