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Elle
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
Why the Fashion World Is Still Enthralled With the Office
Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. Watching Stella McCartney's show at Paris Fashion Week, you might be forgiven for not knowing where to look. There were photocopiers and water coolers on the runway, and pole dancers performing alongside models in glitzy takes on corporate wear. 'Laptop to lap dance,' McCartney called it. Or Anora meets the Adobe Creative Suite, if you like. Either way, it was enough to give an HR rep a tension headache. But while McCartney's fetishization of the office may have been the most actually fetishistic yet, she was far from the only one on the fashion month schedule drawn to this kind of corporate cosplay. The ongoing conundrum of 'what to wear to the office' played itself out at New York Fashion Week, too, as Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, and Carolina Herrera all presented their distinctive takes on the modern-day working woman. At Calvin, which made its return to the runway for the first time since 2018, Veronica Leoni opted to revitalize the brand's '90s minimalist office staples, while Kors and Herrera went for maximalist takes on traditional suiting, perfect for glitzing up your commute. Emerging designer Jane Wade, who has shown an ongoing fascination with modern office life (complete with collections called 'The Commute' and 'The Audit'), got in on the trend with a show called 'The Merger,' where models sported ironic white-collar chic and Lisa Rinna acted out a 'hostile takeover' at the end. Like McCartney, Wade leaned into the idea of office as theater, putting just as much emphasis on the atmosphere as she did on the clothes. It's a tension that comes up in pop culture as well. In movies and TV shows like Babygirl, Industry, and Severance, relatively generic-looking corporate offices become the site of extreme drama and intrigue, and even of sexuality. Even the leisure seekers on this past season of The White Lotus find themselves haunted by work, whether it's Jason Isaacs's character Timothy and his brewing financial-crimes scandal or Carrie Coon's Laurie and her dissatisfaction when she's passed over for a promotion at her law firm. This corporate fixation is part and parcel of our culture's current obsession with the Establishment: people want to dress old money, channel coastal grandmothers, and, apparently, transform themselves into office sirens. Amid economic instability, AI anxiety, and tariff-induced chaos, a job is another asset, even though it's still work. Look at pop culture depictions of office life from the '90s and early 2000s: Gen X cris de coeur like Reality Bites, Office Space, American Beauty, Fight Club, even The Office to some degree, are about people being alienated by a corporate world that now seems incredibly cushy to a modern viewer. Now that that the lifelong, pension-assisted career has evaporated, so has the disdainful portrayal of the office as a cubicle farm where your soul goes to die. As the New York Times reported, influencers are even using generic offices as backdrops for OOTD videos. Office drama has been bubbling up in fashion for some time now. Three years ago, with remote work still influencing WFH-friendly fashion and 'quiet quitting' on the ascendance, I wrote about the way designers were starting to satirize office wear staples, cutting them up, cropping them, or even creating a giant, Office Space-meets-Stop Making Sense suit out of Post-it notes. There was a playful, campy quality to the way designers embraced these shibboleths, a gentle mocking of the costumes of power. ('The suit has always been drag,' author Sarah Jaffe observed when I interviewed her for the piece.) The following year, as the RTO push began in earnest, my colleague Kathleen Hou brought us a treatise on the hybrid-work-friendly 'businesswoman special' aesthetic, which combined oversized blazers and suiting with baggy jeans (think the 2020s answer to the 'corporate at the club' aesthetic). Even non-9 to 5ers like Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner were all over this look, suggesting that the status-y connotations of office wear hold true even if you never darken the door of a corporate lobby. Increasingly, those kinds of suiting-as-blank-canvas propositions have faded away. Now that the girlboss era is long gone, more literal, menswear-influenced totems of power seem to be back, both on the runway and in our wardrobes. McCartney's collection featured blazers that were intentionally oversized, trailing lapels and cuffs, the 'boyfriend jeans' of suiting. MyTheresa's Tiffany Hsu joked to Kristen Bateman in our March issue that she wants to dress like Patrick Bateman—who's once again in the zeitgeist thanks to Luca Guadagnino's in-the-works adaptation of American Psycho. And while Severance is an extreme, sci-fi literalization of the craving for (and the ultimate impossibility of) work-life balance, this contradiction does seem to be something designers are eager to explore. When our personal lives and social media feeds can be monetizable, or at least can help us stand out in the attention economy and get work, the divide between workwear vs. 'life' wear is just as muddled—which may be why designers like McCartney and Wade are looking to dress our outies as well as our innies.
Elle
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Elle
How Fashion Fell in Love With Toys
Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. The newest It accessory isn't a sleek East-West bag or a viral shoe. It's something far more playful: a fuzzy-haired doll that dangles from a model's arm on the runway, or a stuffed rabbit clutched as casually as one might tote a Le Teckel. For fall 2025, these puckish accessories were anointed as the runway's most surprising phenomenon. At Fendi, they came in the form of Cabbage Patch Kids-like dolls, while Kenzo and Simone Rocha turned stuffed animals into bags and clothing. And at Coach, Stuart Vevers ushered bunny slippers and a menagerie of assorted cute critters onto the catwalk. Not to mention the trendy Labubu dolls swinging from designer bags all throughout fashion month. Ruby Redstone, a fashion historian and author of the Substack newsletter Old Fashioned, has been a self-described 'super-nerdy major toy collector' her whole life. For her, collecting toys was an introduction to the world of artists like Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami. Normally, when parsing fashion's current mood, Redstone avoids painting with a broad brush. 'I tend not to say, 'We're looking for cute stuff because the world is hard and sad.' But I do feel like we're in a rather extreme case of that right now,' she says. 'The more tough things get politically, it seems, the more everyone is drawn to these dopamine-inducing cute things that we can sell. And I'm not mad about it. It's a trend that I'm completely at peace with, because it does bring me joy.' For Lucy Bishop, a specialist in handbags and fashion at Sotheby's, the trend is 'absolutely connected to consumers embracing escapism to distract themselves from the pressures of modern life. The childlike comfort factor these playful designs bring is a welcome distraction.' It's also driven by the voracious appetite millennials and Gen Z have for nostalgia, whether it's the Y2K revival or assorted '90s trends. Redstone notes that they 'came of age with Hello Kitty and UglyDolls, and now they're looking at it with rose-colored lenses because they didn't experience it or couldn't participate in it the first time around—and now they can.' Powered by nostalgic yearning, people are also snapping up past luxury crazes in this vein, like the Fendi Bag Bug charm or Givenchy's Bambi keychains. (Going yet further back, Bishop points to the offbeat designs of Franco Moschino and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.) All of this might feel at odds with fashion's recent focus on quiet luxury, capsule wardrobes, and office-ready dressing. For several seasons, young people have been obsessed with looking more adult and put-together, but a general fatigue seems to have settled around this idea. If the totems of adulthood, including homeownership and stable jobs, are increasingly out of reach, why not replace them with totems of a more innocent time? (Interestingly, Bishop notes that just as we have tweens who are obsessed with adult beauty products and elaborate skin care routines, 'we are witnessing consumers in their 20s, 30s, even 40s become obsessed with childlike products. The roles seem to have been reversed.') That said, Redstone reminds me that a penchant for winsome decoration dates far further back than the heyday of the Bag Bug. 'In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, you had women making chatelaines, which were essentially key chains that attached to your waist. They had useful things on them, like scissors and an eyeglass.' But people still decorated them with jewelry and charms, she says. 'This idea of adding little charms that 'show a piece of our personality' is essential to human nature—but showing our personality specifically through a plastic toy is quite contemporary.'
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Is the Naked Dress Trend Officially Over?
Style Points is a column about how fashion intersects with the wider world. Two years ago, Irina Shayk stepped out at the Cannes Film Festival in her underwear. Well, sort of. The supermodel was daringly clad in Gucci-monogrammed lingerie with a transparent overlay. It was the same season that designers like Rick Owens, LaQuan Smith, and even the ever-demure Tory Burch were showcasing transparent looks on the runway, as fashion embraced look-at-me body-consciousness post-lockdown. This year's Cannes fashion has been a more subdued affair (Shayk wore floor-length Armani Privé). A much-talked-about dress code was announced that implicitly banned the naked dress, a former staple of the festival's step-and-repeat. ('For decency reasons, nudity is prohibited on the red carpet, as well as in any other area of the festival,' the official statement reads.) And while the additional rules banning long trains seem to have gone out the window, for the most part, people seem to be playing by the 'decency'-driven rules. Juror Halle Berry stepped out in a Chanel skirt suit, while Julia Garner wore a Gucci gown that was transparent, but lined, in keeping with the dress code. Even Bella Hadid, whose past looks have been the talk of Cannes, kept things fairly PG this go-round. While Cannes is merely one event on the A-lister merry-go-round, its red carpet so far appears to reflect a more staid take on fashion—one shaped by a rise in social conservatism, a renewed nostalgia for retro silhouettes, and perhaps a general exhaustion with the trend of baring it all. Is this an extinction-level event for the naked dress? Look at this year's awards season, where you were less likely to see people in X-ray vision mesh and more likely to spot young stars donning the retro, sweetheart-necklined garb of their '50s and early '60s predecessors (in some cases, literally, as with Elle Fanning and her custom re-creation of a 1953 Balmain gown). When our feeds are clogged with tradwife content and retrograde takes on gender, the policing of what women wear and the retreat to all things modest feels unsurprising, part of a calculated cultural withdrawal into the mythic past. It's also possible that the garment has just lost its power to shock (after all, how many Daily Mail headlines can the ecosystem sustain?). Or that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have changed our relationship to showing off. A decade ago, I wrote about the idea of the couture body, in which 'the body is the new outfit. The gym is the new atelier. Curves and indentations that were once sculpted by corsetry, boning, panniers, strategic padding, or even, more recently, Spanx are now squarely in evidence.' Since then, the pendulum has swung back to the Y2K era, with extreme thinness prized above all else. If the new ideal body is not so hard-won and increasingly attainable, is showcasing it in the same way really a priority? Amid all the drama about what actresses can and can't wear while promoting their films, it's worth noting that there are no similar restrictions for men's clothing. If you ask me, Jeremy Strong in a pink bucket hat and matching corduroy leisure suit feels more objectionable than one more illusion-netted Might Also Like The 15 Best Organic And Clean Shampoos For Any And All Hair Types 100 Gifts That Are $50 Or Under (And Look Way More Expensive Than They Actually Are)
