A recent episode of Architectural Digest’s Open Door series featuring Emilie and Jeff Goldblum’s Los Angeles guesthouse begins the same way as every other instalment. The couple answer the door, dressed in comfortable but stylish clothes, and beckon the camera crew inside, so they can take them on a tour. But almost three minutes into the video, Jeff saunters over to the coffee table in his piano room, picks up an oversized decorative cherry sculpture and marvels at it. “I’ve never seen this big cherry before,” he says admiringly. “I love it; we might buy that.”

The offhand comment exposes the stagecraft behind these videos. The series is set up so we’re led to believe Architectural Digest is giving us candid, behind-the-scenes access to a celebrity’s home, allowing us to be awed by their refined taste in art, furniture and décor. In reality, the AD team descend on the residence before filming so they can do what’s called “set dressing”, whereby stylists rearrange objects, clean up clutter and bring in decorative pieces to make the space more camera-ready. This is how Dakota Johnson ended up saying she loves displaying limes in her kitchen, only to later admit to Jimmy Fallon that she’s actually allergic to them.

This is a healthy reminder that not everything you see online is an accurate depiction of reality, particularly when it comes to anything related to style. If someone were to watch every episode of Open Door and then glance up, even momentarily, at their own residence, they might feel a sense of shame and inadequacy.

These celebrities appear to live such perfect, uncluttered lives – even the two dozen limes are perfectly stacked like a Donald Judd sculpture, rather than languishing at the bottom of a crisper drawer, some hardened and mottled brown. However, these depictions are only half-truths. The Goldblums do have a beautiful guest home that’s tastefully furnished, but removed are detritus and entropy of everyday life, which might otherwise bother the eye.

A similar thing can be said of our wardrobes. The internet today is teeming with influencers who are eager to tell you what’s wrong with an outfit. I admittedly landed this very job, writing for MR PORTER, because I grew a social media following from telling people about collar gaps and shoulder divots, the telltale signs that a suit doesn’t fit perfectly. I have no intention of stopping until I can afford to buy a home in a walkable neighbourhood, but let this article be an antidote, no matter how small, to this neurosis.

The perfectly tailored outfits you see online are not unlike the perfectly arranged homes. These are images masquerading as representations of ordinary life, yet are deliberately generated by commercial enterprises to sell you things. A company may make beautiful clothes, but getting them to read as beautiful – perhaps even aspirational – requires more than good tailoring. It needs the right lighting and photography, not to mention a bit of fiddling and adjusting. Even the perfect pair of trousers will crumple when the wind blows.

A stylish outfit does not even need to look perfect. Anyone who has been reading about men’s style for a while now will be familiar with sprezzatura, a useful, if overused, concept first coined by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book Of The Courtier (1528). Castiglione originally used the term to describe how courtiers could impress a monarch by performing their duties well and then concealing all their effort, making themselves seem more talented than they are.

Menswear writers later co-opted the word to describe that ineffable quality that has underpinned men’s style since the days of Beau Brummell, who famously spent hours in the morning fastidiously tying his cravat to make it seem as though he had just thrown it on. The idea is that for an outfit to look good, it must look natural – and nothing adds that sense of effortlessness than putting on a good outfit and forgetting all about it.

Sometimes imperfection isn’t just about telegraphing nonchalance – it can be an integral part of an aesthetic. Take chore coats, for example. Originally conceived as outerwear for farmhands and factory workers, it was intentionally cut to be roomy and made with sleeves set at a higher angle, so they projected slightly more outward from the body. By setting the sleeves this way, the wearer had a freer range of movement, even if it resulted in a somewhat messier look around the chest when their arms were resting by their side. The best chore coats today hew close to this tradition, as the looser, messier silhouette evokes the romantic history of workwear and the unselfconscious, salt-of-the-earth characters we associate with it.

There are plenty of garments like this: Aran sweaters with sleeves that bunch around the wrist like an accordion; army field jackets with shoulder seams that fall off your shoulder bone; tweed Balmacaans that drape over your body with all the precision of a child wearing a blanket as a cape. These things look good not despite their imperfect fit, but because of it.

If you find yourself fussing too much over an outfit, reconsider where you get your style inspiration. The most stylish people I see daily look nothing like the ambulatory mannequins shown to me on Instagram. Instead, they are punks hanging outside record stores, wearing black denim jackets decorated with countercultural patches. Or nebbish seniors attending author talks at independent bookstores, wearing their stretched-out Shaker knits and faded ball caps. Or take George Plimpton, the famed American writer who always looked impeccable in his soft-shouldered tweeds, Shetland knits and Oxford-cloth button-downs.

In the late 1950s, shortly after cofounding The Paris Review, Plimpton visited Ernest Hemingway in Havana, Cuba, where the latter had written The Old Man And The Sea and much of For Whom The Bell Tolls. Over the course of this visit, Plimpton agreed to be fitted in a custom safari jacket modelled after something Hemingway wore. But during the fitting, the tailor spent a bit too much time adjusting the sleeve and smoothing over wrinkles. Plimpton later admitted to a friend that the fitting went on for too long and “made him uncomfortable”.

Perhaps it was this distance from style – an appreciation for clothes without the urge to fuss over them – that gave Plimpton his dashing désinvolture. It’s this attitude that we should cultivate, not the artificial perfection sold to us through commercial imagery.