THEMEMO: YOU BETTER WORK
OUR JOBS HAVE BEEN EXPERIENCING A VIBE SHIFT – AND WE’RE SEEING THE TENSION PLAY OUT ON THE RUNWAY
SOME COSMIC JOKE MUST BE AFOOT, BECAUSE IT’S WHILE I’M on the phone with Sarah Jaffe that Sheryl Sandberg announces she’s stepping down from her powerful perch as the COO of Meta. The on-the-nose death knell of the Lean In era is appropriate, because Jaffe and I are having an extremely relevant conversation about women and work. Her book Work Won’t Love
You Back examines the drawbacks of our culture’s extreme devotion to the grind – pretty much the opposite of Sandberg’s approach. And while she might not be your typical source for a fashion article, Jaffe’s insight is coming in handy right now.
A frankly confusing array of spliced, deconstructed suiting paraded down the AW22 runways, in what read as a reaction to our ever-changing work world. The lines between career and private life have become increasingly blurred by remote ofces and our digital tethers, and so have those that separate dressing for work and play. We saw this at Coperni, where Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer turned out a midriff-baring miniskirt set in grey annel, and at Fendi, where Kim Jones sexed up the prim fabric with short shorts and gloves. The Working Girl in pinstripes and the girlboss in the hot-pink suit had given way to a winking, ultra-girly reclamation of masculine ofcewear tropes.
Jaffe sees it as a post-#MeToo reaction: ‘[It’s] sexy workwear, as in, “Actually, f*ck you, I’m going to wear a hot suit to work, and if you grab my ass, it’s still your problem.”’ It also feels like a rejection of some of the gender dynamics of the modern ofce. ‘What Covid showed us,’ she says, ‘is how much unpaid care work women are still responsible for outside the workplace.’ And, she adds, the workplace.
That growing awareness, and the mini revolutions that have come along with it, seems to be driving designers to reinvent the pillars of traditional ofce dressing. Take the new line Kind Regards, helmed by Shopé Delano, that launched with a convertible jumpsuit that bridged the gap between work and play. Slashing up pinstriped tailoring, as the designer Ashlynn Park did, and turning it into a tube top and miniskirt, feels like taking a tiny shot across the bows at the ofcial uniform of patriarchy. While Park’s design tweak is meant to be playful, she says she is deadly serious about workplace equity. As a mother of two, she struggled with fashion’s long hours, and with her own brand, Ashlyn, wanted to set an example for her daughters by, ‘making the right environment in this industry,’ which is why her studio nishes for the day at ve o’clock.
At Coperni, Vaillant and his co-designer Meyer were aiming for something ‘between an ofcewear and a teenager vibe’. Vaillant says their miniskirt look has been a best-seller, but admits that even he is unsure what circumstances people are buying it for. ‘You can wear it for a special occasion,’ he says, ‘but you can also wear it at the ofce, for sure.’ (Maybe in France.)
It’s more likely that most of these pieces will never nd their way into uorescent-lit ofce cubicles, if only because of their high-camp quality. ‘The suit has always been drag,’ says Jaffe. It’s a classic garment, one that, ‘changes to a degree that it doesn’t at the same time, and men are always safe in it. As long as they’re wearing a suit – and it can be a really bad, ill-tting Donald Trump suit – they’re still powerful, right?’ she says. ‘Whereas there’s a lot more pressure on women in terms of what we’re supposed to wear. Because you have so many options, there are many more ways to be wrong.’ So while people might not necessarily be taking to the water cooler in pinstriped minis and suit jackets-turned-tube tops anytime soon, the club is another story.
If anything, these aren’t pieces for work, they’re clothes about work – our way of grappling with a world where stability and certainty have ebbed. ‘The romance of work is never perfect,’ as Jaffe puts it. ‘It has always got cracks in it, and there are so many ways that comes out in the culture.’