You are seriously stylish!

With Sébastien Talon, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist 

In response to a fawning admirer who complimented him by saying, "You are so elegant!" Lord Brummel replied, "Not elegant enough since you noticed!". His witty response implies something about style: neither too much, too little, nor somewhere in between! "Dressed to the nines": it's obvious, just like Sunday best. "Dressed as usual" is also obvious, like the jacket you wear every day. Too many colours are pretentious, yet no accents are dull. So, if clothes make the man, when do they create style? The rose is the queen of the garden: it has beauty, not style, and overshadows all other plants. Wildflowers, on the other hand, are all different colours, but they never "clash" with each other: they are stylish and even represent the aesthetic truth of the meadow. Style is the truth of form, which appears without ostentation, without ‘staging’, without preparation - a little like the movements of gymnasts, so fluid that you can no longer see the preparatory exercises. You only need to read five lines to recognise a text by Proust or look at five square centimetres of a canvas to recognise a painting by Pollock: style is a signature. So, to describe someone's way of dressing as stylish is equivalent to saying: that's you, I recognise you! But unfortunately, we also know that a signature can be forged.