I'd like to see you in my office.
I mean the Feed Me comment section.
Good morning everyone. Today I’d like to discuss my newsfeed’s current obsession with office dressing — Lauren Sanchez’s sexy inauguration outfit, which I thought was “Office Siren” embodied; The New York Times’s coverage of Men’s Fashion Week in Paris (including Jacob Gallagher’s description of “banker blue button-ups”); the anything-can-happen office utopia shown in Babygirl; and of course, WSJ’s coverage of Gen Z’s corporate fetish.
How do you feel about getting dressed for your office? Is this coverage reflective of what you see around your office? Would you like it to be?
See you in the comments.
I believe it’s part of a larger macrotrend, which I’m calling ‘Regressive Nostalgia.’** It’s basically “make america great again” translated into an aesthetic context: a rose-colored glasses view of the ‘good old times,’ which encompasses the romanticization of both the 50s/60s (tradwifery & domestic life) and the 80s (office power dressing & extravagant parties, suits and martinis). The goal is: be the office siren to land the man and then be the tradwife. Of course, it was only good times for rich white men. The rosy memories seem to forget the realities of housewives imprisoned in thankless marriages and the crack epidemic ravaging underprivileged communities. This was always a common perspective among white Boomer men, but I theorize this has been able to gain momentum recently because Gen Z has no recollection or references. Gen X and older millennials had Boomer grandmothers or mothers to tell the true stories of what life was actually like. Gen Z and some younger millennials don't. They just see the movies and magazines from those times and think it looked pretty cute. It’s the exact same thing with smoking, they didn’t see their grandparents or parents deal with lung cancer, they grew up in a world where none of those issues existed. They saw other issues instead - overworked mothers trying to do it all, the commercialization of wellness. So, a perfect storm for us to recreate all these wonderful things. Basically, I think the office siren aesthetics are tied to much bigger cultural shifts.
**Currently working on a post about this, open to other ideas for the name.
the tension of my life is that I don’t want to have to go through the bullshit of getting dressed for work every morning but working from home and never having a real reason to put myself together very clearly negatively affects my mood and sense of self