Craft, art and the pursuit of style

[Costi]

Clothes are to style what words are to poetry, notes to music and line to painting: the material. Everyone wears clothes.

Craft makes competent in using material. The craft of dress can be learned. There is no hope of art without mastering the craft first.

Style happens spontaneously when we stop making the effort to avoid being ourselves. Though it’s not a destination, few are exempt of having to travel to arrive to it. It is often in the later reflux, not in the early offensive. But there is no striving towards it, either: it is the ultimate relaxation, not the supreme contraction.

Practise your craft, but don’t engross in it: look beyond, and gain ease of execution. At some point, you will start noticing style out of the corner of your eye. Don’t try to capture it, or you’ll lose it in the effort: you can’t have style (and there is no such thing as your style). Cease conscious effort and let your acquired craft work through you. Stop dressing yourself. Just dress.
Et voilà, there is style!

[vancehn]

Indeed

[Luca]

An interesting post by Costi, to which I append a few comments.

Clothes are to style what words are to poetry, notes to music and line to painting: the material.

Classical architects often use that metaphor , saying that classicism is a vocabulary (or grammar) and that each building erected in that tradition can be as different as sentences by different writers.

There is no hope of art without mastering the craft first.

I wholeheartedly agree but fell I should point out that this runs counter to the past century or so of aesthetic and art theory consensus.

…often in the later reflux, not in the early offensive. But there is no striving towards it…start noticing style out of the corner of your eye. Don’t try to capture it…Cease conscious effort

Have you read “Obliquity” by J. Kay?

…there is no such thing as your style)

This may be worth expanding upon. Prima facie, it would appear that many people on this site spend a great deal of time and treasure on “their” style. In saying there is no personal style, are you saying there is one style? Please expatiate.

[Costi]

Indeed

Amen

[Costi]

…there is no such thing as your style)

This may be worth expanding upon. Prima facie, it would appear that many people on this site spend a great deal of time and treasure on “their” style. In saying there is no personal style, are you saying there is one style? Please expatiate.

The search for originality epitomizes the effort to avoid being oneself. How can one search for what is not lost, and where to look for it outside? But this is good in the high tide phase, in the early offensive. It is a way to experience and learn. It helps acquire the craft, too. However, in the end we must realize that “everyone else is taken”, in Oscar Wilde’s words, so we are left with being ourselves. If this realization is gladly embraced, rather than denied or received with sad resignation, the ebb is rich with revelations.
“My style” not only makes it sound like a possession that can be sold (like clothes) or a skill that can be taught (like dressing), but also involves the idea that I can (or indeed should) choose it from many on display, as in a sweets shop; or that I may construct it, as a tailor does with a coat. Style develops as an attribute, rather than being acquired as a possession. The question is not what to have, and not even what to do, but how to be.
We may say there is one style in the way Tolstoy describes happiness (uncountable, isn’t it?) at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

No, I didn’t read “Obliquity” – I’ll look it up.

[hectorm]

Prima facie, it would appear that many people on this site spend a great deal of time and treasure on “their” style.

Not only amongst our LL fellow members.
If you go through the biographies and memoirs of those broadly recognized as icons of style (Beau Brummel, Windsor, Eden, l´Avvocato, etc., etc.), they seem to have spent lots of time and blood dealing with their personal style. Maybe the essence of style is effortless, but your personal style -as a particular interpretation of the former- is consuming.

[Costi]

I wonder, hectorm - was it their personal style they were busy with, or were they mostly consumed, like all of us, with how to dress? - what cloth, what cut, what tailor, how to mix, what looks good, what doesn't. The craft is consuming - to acquire, to practise.

The apprentice doesn't look for the ultimate expression of his individuality or some ideal in his first (tens of) canvases - he is merely trying out his hand, understanding how to mix colours, how to hold the brush, what stroke to use. He may admire great masters and the mysterious quality that emanates from some of their paintings, but he will focus on technique. With time, as the craft is transcended, he will hopefully stop emulating, and accidentally discover himself. Armed with the mastery of his means, he will imbue his canvases with his own mysterious quality - substantially the same, yet different in expression from that of the masters whom he admired.

Focusing directly on style is counterproductive: it won't obey your command. It is as elusive as magnetism: the only way to keep it going is to make sure there is electricity running through the coil. It's indirect in nature. We cannot will ourselves into style, as we cannot will ourselves into love. What we can (and should) do, however, is to get the craft right. All those you mention, hectorm, were masters at the craft of dress: they knew what kind of tailoring suited them, how to choose a tie, what shoes to wear to a tweed jacket.

There are some very competent dressers with no style whatsoever. Particularly those keen on having a personal style end up in a spasmodic contraction to display relaxed sprezzatura or some other sartorial value held in high esteem, which effectively dissipates any aura of style that might otherwise shine through. They know the rules, the grammar and vocabulary (in Luca's terms), but the craft is just "too small" for them from the outset, they insist on showing "personality", on being "individual", on appearing "unique"; they already ARE all these things, so how could they possibly fail to manifest them? Simple: by counterfeiting them, out of insecurity.

[C.Lee]

...those broadly recognized as icons of style (Beau Brummel, Windsor, Eden, l´Avvocato, etc., etc.),...

The thing is, style remains when the clothes are gone. Picture any of the men above in their bathing suit. Is their presence in any way diminished? One's style is composed of a multitude of visual cues in addition to clothes, e.g. gaze and posture. We taste with our eyes, and clothes are no sugar-coat to any underlying bitterness.

[Costi]

We taste with our eyes, and clothes are no sugar-coat to any underlying bitterness.

How inspired, C.Lee! Yes...

Also conversely, take the clothes off our heroes and put them on a mannequin: does it have their style? Any style?

Again - because the topic was debated at length here -, there is no moral judgment in this: the underlying bitterness is not that of the "vicious", nor is the sweetness that of the "virtuous". It is the bitterness of incongruence, of refusing oneself, of looking for the illusory satisfaction of being another person in another time and another place.
The man of style fully inhabits his own contour, here and now - that's what "presence" means: being "at home". But this is not an invitation to visit: they make us inhabit our own here and now. In that, we may share the feeling of being "at home" - the same, ultimately, but only because it is perceived as our own.

[Luca]

I think you conflate charisma with style. They are two different qualities, I think, though complementary or even synergetic.
I appreciate the desire of many posters, on a site like this, to bestow mystical, impalpable, exalted qualities to the concept of "style". I personally prefer a more modest, tangible definition that does unnecessarily drag in something infinitely more valuable: character.
Style is nice (maybe even lovely), but superficial. One can be stylish and an utter nonety in every other respect (and vice versa). Many here disagree because, naturally, humans tend towards conflation of good OR bad qualities (cognitive psychologist call it the halo effect).
Try this thought experiment. Think of a person you know (or know of) that is extremely accomplished and honest and generous too BUT whose personal clothing or aesthetic choices make you literally cringe.
You see, it is possible to be admirable in other respects but inelegant (unstylish). It then follows the opposite is also possible.
But I repeat myself.

[Frederic Leighton]

[...] The man of style fully inhabits his own contour, here and now - that's what "presence" means: being "at home". But this is not an invitation to visit: they make us inhabit our own here and now. In that, we may share the feeling of being "at home" - the same, ultimately, but only because it is perceived as our own.

Writing, composing a piece of music or performing it, and with these all the possible ways to create something, where the 'creation' is an association of ideas, a representation brought to consciousness: this process is rarely a peaceful one; it often involves the blood mentioned by Hectorm. For the man of style (better, I'd say, for the man dealing with style(s)), inhabiting his own contour often took and takes the forms of a withdrawal, of a contraction of the contour, of a crumbling of the milieu.

It's not in the power of a 'stylus', the instrument for writing and, metonymously, the way of writing of a particular author, to give birth to something uncountable and universal. But yes, it can awake feelings and sometimes a sympathetic urge to create.

[Costi]

Luca, I also appreciate your praiseworthy attempt at rationalizing, but the tools of analysis can't help us put our finger on style. Any scalpel in hand approach of style ends up with a bunch of parts neither of which explains what was there before the whole had been taken apart.
If it were as you write, we could buy, learn or somehow acquire style. But we can't. I'm pointing at what we can do, and that is mastering the craft of dressing. You are right, I know great people who are terrible dressers, as well as great dressers who are jerks. I don't conflate style and morals - I just wrote that, because I have seen this misinterpretation before. Perhaps you de-flate style to mere nicety or loveliness, a certain affectation, a disposition to please, a desire to be liked and an inclination to fake. That is understandable, but it is all about being outside of oneself. Any quest for the appearance of style is, by definition, non-style. But if you prefer this modest, tangible, lovely and superficial thing, which you call by the same word, so be it. It is not what I am trying to write about.

[Costi]

inhabiting his own contour often took and takes the forms of a withdrawal, of a contraction of the contour, of a crumbling of the milieu.

I agree, Federico - it is this reflux that I refer to. We stop populating our ontological contour with phantasms, and let our being actualize itself here and now, as it is. The contour itself can't shrink, it is what we are. But in this contraction of the world of possibilities to the acceptance of what we are, we find a qualitative difference: this is real, not wishful. With this realization, we no longer look for "styles", they have no reality for us. "To be free is to be unable to do otherwise" - free to chose ourselves: "this one", rather the countless "that one" which seem possible, but which we are not.

[lgcintra]

Fellow Loungers, if I may intrude into this conversation, is it possible to differentiate a fop from a fool, or they're essentially the same? And, if I understood it correctly, the sentence is that whom is fortunate enough to exude style does not need, or can even dismiss, expensive and/or exquisite clothes? And as Oscar Wilde put it, in other terms obviously: if you have it, it doesn't matter what you wear; if you don't have it also doesn't matter what you wear...

[Luca]

…you de-flate style to mere nicety or loveliness, a certain affectation, a disposition to please, a desire to be liked and an inclination to fake

I simply “de-flate” it to the common, comparatively precise, limited meaning it has. Without pathos; without a particular ethos. Pure Logos.

Any quest for the appearance of style is, by definition, non-style

I would like to understand that statement better.

…if you prefer this modest, tangible, lovely and superficial thing

I prefer the modest definition. I think much of this discussion is what the deconstructivists would call “word tricks” (but without their implied denigration, on my part) – a lexical misunderstanding rather than an ontological difference.
What would you give as a simple definition or example (imagine you are explaining it to a child) of “style”?