SOPHIA LOREN'S SECRET TO EFFORTLESS ELEGANCE

Some women do not follow style. They become it. Sophia Loren is proof that Italian elegance is, above all, a way of being.

There is a photograph of Sophia Loren in Capri, in the early sixties, in which she is doing nothing in particular. A scarf on her head, dark glasses, a white shirt open over her swimsuit. And yet it is impossible to look at anything else. It is not the clothes. It is the way she inhabits them. Loren understood, before almost anyone, that elegance is not what you wear; it is the certainty with which you stand inside what you wear.

The confidence that comes from within. Loren never dressed to be approved of. She dressed for herself, and the difference showed in everything. In an age when fashion asked women to hold themselves in, she took up all the space without ever raising her voice. That is the presence a well-chosen piece gives back: not the one that shouts, but the one that is enough.

The summer in Conca dei Marini. It was in the small cove of Conca dei Marini, on the Amalfi Coast, that Loren and Carlo Ponti spent their summers. It is a coast that changes colour by the hour, from the turquoise of the shallows to the terracotta of the rooftops, and it is impossible not to think of it before the Marini bikini, which gathers up exactly that gradient. Loren wore the coast the way you wear something without thinking about it. It was simply her summer home.

Fewer pieces, more intention. Loren's holiday wardrobe fitted into a small suitcase. A white shirt, a black swimsuit, a scarf, a pair of gold earrings that caught the sun. The lesson is not austerity; it is editing. A black swimsuit like the Salerno needs no company. Textured gold earrings like the Sole do the rest on their own.

Elegance as a mother tongue. Born in Naples, a few kilometres from Capri, Loren never had to learn the coast. She spoke it. And perhaps that is the real lesson for anyone who admires her today: elegance is not copied from the outside; it is built from within, with a few right choices, repeated with conviction until they become unmistakable.

"Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti," she once said, with the humour of a woman who never took her own beauty too seriously. Perhaps that is the secret the trends will never grasp. The most elegant woman in the room is, almost always, the one having the most fun.