Bella Hadid’s return to the catwalks became the image of the season at last Paris Fashion Week. The model wore a suit by Anthony Vaccarello in the collection that paid tribute to the classic Le Smoking, the women’s tuxedo created by the couturier Yves Saint Laurent in 1966 with which he redefined the garment. Structured suits, trench coats, ties and large glasses followed one another, setting the trend for a corporate style with an air of sophistication that draws on the nostalgia of the looks office from another era. And it has already reached the streets and the networks, where videos that identify it under nomenclatures such as corporate core, siren office and business core to underline his inspiration in this imagery.
The origin: an emancipatory interpretation
At the end of the 60s, Yves Saint Laurent drew on men’s clothing and the influence of Chanel to create a style that accompanied the popular sentiment of the new times. In the midst of the second feminist wave, the civil rights movement and the fight for the rights of the LGTBIQ+ collective, fashion was reinvented to meet the needs demanded by society. The effective incorporation of women into liberal professions, historically exercised by men, turned the suit into a synonym for emancipation and power dressing (power clothing). “The normal thing is that women tried to look like people of power, who were always men, so efforts to achieve equality involved imitating their behaviors and reproducing their clothing,” Ana Velasco Molpeceres, professor, tells elDiario.es. of journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid specialized in studies on fashion and social change.
The normal thing is that women tried to look like people of power, which were always men, so efforts to achieve equality involved imitating their behaviors and reproducing their clothing.
Ana Velasco Molpeceres
— professor at the UCM specialized in fashion studies
The questioning of gender roles gave meaning to the use of the suit also in circles queer and intellectuals. “In the case of the LGTBIQ+ group, the suit is not used to integrate into masculinized environments, but on the contrary: there they are appropriating something very masculine not to fit in, but to transgress,” says Elizabeth Duval, writer and current Secretary of Communication of Sumar, who usually wears jackets, suit pants and vests in his public appearances. From this perspective you can read the uniforms of writers and artists such as Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz and Patti Smith, or the costumes of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977), which represented the new archetype of women of the 70s and 80s.
A conservative turn in fashion
Left behind is the model that has dominated the trends of the last decade with sportswear or athleisurewhich has turned tracksuits and relaxed urban fashion, with sneakers and sweatshirts, into luxury objects and new status symbols. The paradigm shift is seen on the catwalks, series and windows of fast fashion chains, which opt for basics and neutral colors with straight cuts.
In periods of crisis, fashion tends to veer towards the conservative: “It is nothing new, nor any secret, that in uncertain times, resorting to classic clothing considered socially appropriate is insurance: it places us within the group that we do not want to abandon, It gives us security at a very primary, visceral level,” María José Pérez Méndez, fashion journalist and co-founder of the Dmoda.io platform, told this medium. So in times when the credibility of democratic institutions decreases, far-right proclamations grow and people suffer the consequences of the loss of purchasing power, we experience the return of an elegance from another time: more classic, Western and bourgeois.
Its objective is to fulfill an aspirational role that seeks to imitate the style of the elites. As the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky already announced in his work The ephemeral empire of the ephemeral: fashion and its destiny in modern societies (Anagrama, 1990), “[…] The decrees of fashion manage to spread thanks to the desire of individuals to resemble those who are judged superior, those who radiate prestige and rank.
The paradigm shift is seen on the catwalks, series and windows of fast fashion chains, which opt for basics and neutral colors with straight cuts.
At a time when teleworking has been implemented to a greater extent, social networks are filled with images of young women dressed as if they worked for a corporation in the financial district of some big city. “The girls we see in these campaigns don’t look like they are their own bosses. They run from one place to another through a financial district, some carry agendas, pens, coffees between their fingers and take notes along the street. It is the longing for a corporate job within an office and for a time before the extension of remote work,” says Alba Correa, a journalist specializing in fashion. In addition to fueling nostalgia, digital environments encourage the desire to blend in with the content we consume: we want to look like those working girl that transmit success and we do it by dressing just like them.
Culture of effort vs. desacralization of work
The proliferation on the Internet of a community of users who defend the culture of effort and want to emulate the lifestyle of stockbrokers and investors from their bedroom, gives wings to the mass market to invite us to dress like white-collar workers; even if our lives have nothing to do with the profile of those workers. “There are people who can’t dress how they want. [en el trabajo] because they work in a bakery, driving a bus or taking care of minors. It is incongruous that they are suggested to dress as if they were going to an office to go to the movies or go out with friends,” adds Correa.
But this current that exalts the myth of meritocracy coexists with a change in mentality in this regard that especially affects the younger generations, with the demand for the right to a life beyond productivity. Proposals such as the four-day work day, family conciliation or digital disconnection are beginning to form part of the political discourse and are consolidating as a current of thought that is already permeating public opinion. In recent years, criticism of work and general fatigue have been part of the Internet humor through publications full of irony, but they also appear in the stories of millennial and zeta voices in works such as Supersaurus (Blackie Books, 2022), Joy (Siruela, 2023) and May something happen soon (Sigilo Editorial, 2024).
Thus the paradox arises: among those anti-work messages and reflections championed by the most progressive sectors, an aesthetic evocation of the culture of effort sneaks in, and it does so especially through the digital environment, where marketing and the fashion industry idealize the called trends corp core, siren office and businesscore. “Many people who dress as if they were going to an office but work from home benefit from the comforts gained by the left. They don’t realize that they imagine a lifestyle that they don’t really share,” says Velasco Molpeceres.
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