Corporate Fetish

Emily Sundberg on the odd reversal of the office as “escape” in fashion and styling. Links from Daisy Alioto.

This article was originally published in Feed Me.

I’ve recently become aware of a spike in something I like to call the Corporate Fetish (I initially used this term a few months ago). The Corporate Fetish is when people glamorize the idea of an office—the water cooler conversations, getting dressed (actually dressed, dry-cleaner-pick-up dressed) for an 8-7 job, and spinning around in a desk chair. This is all while office occupancy hovers around 50% in New York. Of course cubicles are idealized, some of these creative directors are probably young enough to have only experienced an open office plan!

Yesterday, I saw luxury knitwear brand The Elder Statesman’s FW 24 campaign launch. It was shot at WSA, the downtown skyscraper-turned-workspace run by Happier People (the same team behind Palm Heights). What does it say that I recognize the building the campaign was shot in? The building that has not even really opened yet? Unsure.

Back to The Elder Statesman. The Vogue write-up reads, “Later this year, The Elder Statesman will be opening a store in New York City. Naturally, the fall collection was inspired by a specific vision of the Big Apple—particularly the people in their high-powered corporate jobs that fill (or used to fill) the city’s skyscrapers.” I DM’d Bailey Hunter, the creative director of The Elder statesman, what was on the mood board. She said it was just her version of American Psycho.

A few weeks ago, I started running my mouth around the idea of the Corporate Fetish. One day, actress and influencer Serena Kerrigan used the phrase in one of her Instagram captions. “I almost tagged you,” she told me. The photo was of Kerrigan with a bombshell blowout, in an oversized blazer. In the days prior to Kerrigan’s post, entrepreneurs Danielle Bernstein (founder of We Wore What), Paige Lorenze (founder of Dairy Boy), and Alix Earle (host of Hot Mess) all posted similar photos in oversized suits. But I guess all suits are oversized when you’re tiny.

This type of styling is the flavor of choice for many modern-day “female founders” in 2024. It signals “I work” and “I’m powerful” and “maybe this is a candid power suit and I just look like this every day.” It’s unclear if these women have a relationship with the blazer as a piece of clothing, but they know some powerful women do. And you know what? Sometimes the most obvious answer is the right one. Kerrigan tells me that the suit is CEO bad bitch energy “It's money. It's masculine. It's power. It's board room cunt.” I think what we’re trying to unlock here is charisma and mystery—so few people can actually make big money, of course we’re paying attention to the people who dress like they do.

I texted Emilie Hawtin, a brand consultant, and founder of Clementina: a tailoring-focused womenswear line. “I wouldn’t really trust anyone in an oversized blazer to make my strategic decisions but that’s gender neutral. Any woman in a blazer is chic, oversized is Fashion and Trend. It’s fun sometimes, but a woman who knows herself and exudes self confidence doesn’t need to rely on that—she’s grown into her clothes.”

The costume is not the only part of The Corporate Fetish. We also have to discuss the set: the office.

The Corporate Fetish office has desktop computers and printers. It has cubicles, and well-attended office parties where people drink. In the actual office, everyone knows too much about the downsides of drinking at happy hour that they don’t want to consider the upsides. In the Corporate Fetish office, employees (all the women are hot and well-dressed) are happy. Maybe they even hook up! In the actual office of today, serendipity is either designed or dead.

The Corporate Fetish office provides structure, routine, and friends. Nobody is discussing the dreadful commute, or awful hours, or the looming horror of AI replacing a team. Everyone answers the phone, and nobody is texting at their desk. It’s the best version of the office we imagine, and the one that we’re not going to get anything close to as people get forced back in. According to a recent survey, the distance between employers and their respective employees’ homes blew up between 2019 and 2023—from 10 miles to 27 miles, on average!

Corporate offices, specifically the Wall Street-ified mid-90s version of ones that these shoots are putting on a pedestal, are a funny thing to be nostalgic for. Office Space, Wall Street, American Psycho and other 90s finance movies were literally about corporate life being soul-sucking, inhuman, and surreal. The campaigns are somewhat less interested in engaging with the office as it is now (stretch fabrics, headphones, Stanley cups, generally replicating the conditions of one’s own home), and much more interested in building intrigue around what once was. After Mad Men universe, pre-The Office universe, there was something normal, steady, replicable in an “office”… approval from shareholders to build temples to their success, rooms that were expressive of American corporate power, but also imposing (especially in the ‘80s). I think that’s the north star of a lot of these campaigns.

Prada’s recent mens’ show featured a set that switched from stylized office cubicles to the great outdoors, which summarized the truth of our world: we have to work, but we have innate needs to be in nature. In the show notes Raf Simons said, “Most people’s screen savers are nature, but then at the end, we sit in this very synthetic, human-made environment.”

I guess there is something more romantic to think about here: the office as an escape. The office was once a place you put yourself together for and performed at. Office employees had this separate life with relationships they wanted to check in to, not out of. Today, people have endless separate lives at their fingertips to check in and out of, with as many personalities as they choose. Group texts, DMs, social media pages and side hustle Zoom meetings. You can unlock your phone at work and be at another job in seconds. The office of today is just a room with WiFi and power outlets. Maybe even a doorman with whom you don’t make eye contact with as you scroll through Twitter and walk past him.

All of the office imagery feels like a healthy dose of adulthood after months of being pushed “girlhood”. I had a really bad reaction to that. I probably had more in common with Barbie’s dad than Barbie.

Maybe the power suit is the opposite side of the girlhood bow coin. People can fantasize about reclaiming a very heightened, specific version of childhood and people can fantasize about claiming heightened versions of adulthood. The interesting thing about playing dress up is that sometimes it gets you where you want to go, which is what Kerrigan was telling me.

I was reading the show notes from Miu Miu’s FW 2024 show yesterday. The pearls and oversized blazers and cutout and bows created a catalog of all types of women. When Mrs. Prada came out at the end of the show, she had little to say, but it was to the point. “I think they are classics. Everyone can choose from them to be a child, or a lady. Every single morning, I decide if I’m going to be 15 years old, or a lady near death.”

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• “Apollo is no stranger to Hollywood, but its interest in Paramount comes at a trying time for the industry.” (Axios)

• "M M M" by Still House Plants (YouTube)

• The Hayao Miyazaki Sequences That Changed Animators’ Lives (Vulture)

• Malcolm Harris recommends Sybil (MUBI)

• “Many of the fans I encountered at Ye’s New York listening party last month looked no older than 15. Several I talked to discovered him through TikTok.” Mano Sundaresan in Vulture

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• “Wanting to be asked to model and wanting to model are each distinct personality defects.” Nicolaia Rips on her failed modeling career (Vogue)

• Give Chet Hanks a book club! (The Cut)

• Fitzcarraldo Editions launches a poetry list (The Bookseller)

• Sometimes the annoyed become the annoying: on Lauren Oyler’s new book. (Art Review)

• Why are restaurants charging so much to cancel reservations? (The New York Times)

• “I had this whole period last summer where I completely lost track of my sensibility.” A short story by Noor Qasim. (The Drift)

• A new app lets you build games out of your own photos (The Guardian)

• KitchenAid is playing the status color game (Eater)

• I’m not famous but I too loooove chewing a toothpick (NYLON)

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