I was wandering around in Ikea at Potomac Mills in search of storage bins for my kids’ messy rooms when I stumbled upon a very stylish woman in the picture aisle. It is rare to find great style, rarer still to find on a random day in Ikea. I love love love the neutral palette but the shoes were what captured my heart. She said she got them from New York, which figures. Unfortunately, we are hard-pressed to find gems like that around here.
This woman had what I call Sprezzatura which means is an Italian word originating from Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display “an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hide the conscious effort that went into them.”
I don’t know how much effort went into her outfit but she had Sprezzatura in spades!
