Why Does Luxury Love the Look of Labor?

Scene 1: Apocalypse

One thing about us humans: we love the idea of going extinct. 

And there’s something especially intoxicating in indulging the fantasy of a giant flaming fireball flying towards us from outer space and the prospect of an impending, inevitable doom this portends, while we’re here braving the bigger threats to our species (drafting Hinge DMs on ChatGPT).

Obviously, this is where evolution failed the dinosaurs.

For Carol Kohl, titular protagonist to Netflix’s Carol & the End of the World (2023), however, that fantasy is very much a reality. 

But where her parents (retired septuagenarians and freewheeling nudists) are very much thriving in a throuple with their live-in home-care provider, and her neighbors, recently returned from Tibet, seek out spiritual enlightenment, Carol, self-contained, unslender and smart, is more overwhelmed by the sudden expectation that she must now go out and find purpose in her life, than she is by the prospect of dying in a fiery cataclysm in seven months. 

So, by day, she does the laundry, calls the dentist, misses recycling (“the feeling I get when saving money”), and pays bills to a bank that no longer exists. By night, she sits alone in front of the TV, while the rest of the world is busy savoring every last seductive second of the human species.

Where she ultimately does stumble upon her life’s purpose, ironically, is not in some cavernous corner of carnal desire, but instead, within the mindless, repetitive routine of white-collar paperwork in the accountancy department of a nameless company dubbed The Distraction.

As Donna, one of her coworkers, puts it, “Sometimes you just need an office.”

Scene 2: Lockdown

“I started to lose my mind about nine days into self-quarantine,” wrote Liana Satenstein for Vogue in 2020. And she wasn’t alone. Between videos of women “stealing toilet paper out of another’s overstocked cart” and “gouging the prices of hand sanitizer”, we were all collectively going crazy. 

Going out? A thing of the past. Our purses? Mere memories. “Let me slowly disintegrate into the fibers of my sweatpants!” Satenstein quips.

“And then,” she laments, “the Zoom meeting request came from my boss.”

It was a truly fantastical time, dear reader. Back when “there’s someone who wants to join us” was more likely to refer to Karen from HR than your deceased forefather onboard The Mayflower. Back when you could join appraisal meetings in cookie-crusted sweatpants, underpants, or really, no pants at all, while having Contagion (2011) on loop in the background. Back when the soul-sucking, mind-numbing, pants-pinching grind of our day jobs… quite literally ground to a halt. And like our titular Carol, we missed it.

We missed getting together with a group of complete strangers to engage in not-the-most-engaging tasks. Like Carol, we missed baking banana bread for said group and going to Applebee’s for management-mandated happy hours and hearing our coworkers embarrass themselves at karaoke. We missed the shared sense of purpose it gave us. And we missed dressing up for it.

So naturally, when the lockdown finally lifted, our first instinct was to dress up the first couple of years – jewelry, rhinestones, sequins, sparkles, branding and bling were in abundance. But eventually, it gave way to that boring sense of routine we’d begun to crave yet again.

Enter: corpcore.

Scene 3: Sirens

“She’s ’90s and 2000s Calvin Klein archive, Dolce & Gabbana, and Ralph Lauren. She’s the office siren. And she’s everything we aspire to be this year.” – Asia Bieuville, TikTok content creator and Paris-based fashion student.

On the moodboard?

Bella Hadid in a black pencil skirt from Tom Ford’s Gucci SS98; Gisele Bündchen in a turtleneck, croc-embossed skirt, and knee-high stiletto boots on the Ralph Lauren FW00 runway; and also Gisele Bündchen in Bayonetta glasses as Serena from The Devil Wears Prada (2006).

You see, long before conference calls and COVID had taken over our collective culture, costume designer Patricia Fields had already laid the groundwork for corpcore: exotic young waifs working in pre-Recession print, slipping into lace-trimmed lingerie ahead of a graceful workday at Runway.

The original office sirens, serenading Fifth Avenue and hardly ever concerning themselves with credit card bills, were the exact antithesis of Carol Kohl’s monotone, mundane existence. Instead, they drew their genealogy from the saucy glamour of Basic Instinct (1992), Working Girl (1988) and Clockwatchers (1997), while real-life working girls at Calvin Klein and Donna Karan famously served as muses to the designers themselves!

But with Gen-Z, as Business Insider reports, feeling increasingly disengaged at work (not to mention, the threat of AI taking over our jobs), the contemporary fixation with corpcore is less representative of the workplace today, and more a nostalgia-induced attempt at resurrecting the halcyon heyday of the cubicle. 

In that process, the office itself has become a myth of sorts, “an aesthetic and temporal void, the corporate acme of anti-human modernity,” writes The Cold Magazine, “where we, mere humans, have been dragged from out of our idyllic forests and fields to instead fester in front of computer screens – hunchbacked, pixel-eyed and lobotomy-brained.”

And in its boring banal bleakness looms large the siren, once notorious for luring sailors to their demise in Homer’s Odyssey, now the ultimate fashion fantasy. There are those self-destructive tendencies again, you see.

Scene 4: SS26

When Charli XCX sang:

“Spring Summer 26
When the world is gonna end no hope for any of it
Yeah we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell
Nothing’s gonna save us not music fashion or film”

She was probably talking about fashion’s fixation with workwear.

Because the second (third?) coming of corpcore has been, well, coming for a while now. “I began to see the influences of this trend in the F/W22 shows, where we were starting to move away from ‘fuzziness’ and back towards something more structured,” Bieuville explains, before adding “Miu Miu’s F/W23 collection is what lit the office-siren flame in me.” 

Kim Kardashian then dropped the SKIMS nipple bra campaign (suitably set in an office setting), before appearing on the cover of GQ’s Man of the Year issue eating Cheetos in – you guessed it – a suit. And Mark Gong models at the SS24 Shanghai Fashion Week show balanced coffee cups in one hand and a jacket in the other: “Miranda, here’s ur no-foam skimmed latte with an extra shot, and the jacket u asked me to pick up from Patrick Demarchelier.”

It was, however, the SS26 season when things got spicy for the office siren. 

First, WGSN declared the briefcase the accessory of the year – really the perfect fashion foil to the siren’s pencil skirts and pointy heels (potential for a Beauty and the Briefcase sequel?) Then Mrs. Prada sent Sandra Hüller and Richard E. Grant down the Miu Miu SS26 runway in aprons, once the humble kitchen garment, now reclaimed in candy-colored crochets, retro florals, sheer lace, crystals and leather. Really the death knell for the tradwife.

The show was titled “At Work”.

It was also the year dear Dolly Parton departed us, 9 to 5 subsequently skyrocketing back to the Billboard Hot 100 as we logged onto our own 9-to-5s. But most importantly, what 2026 gave us was season 2 of Adults.

Scene 5: Adulting

“Anton, do you know how many things I’ve tried to get the voice in my head to be quiet?” Issa asks from her new office, “And then I come here, and I enter this, like, fugue state where, for ten hours a day, all I care about is this. I realized this is how you do it. This is how you make time go by.”

It’s sad. It’s also accurate. Or maybe it’s sad just how accurate it is.

Because for those of us navigating an increasingly volatile job market, smaller teams, tighter budgets, and sudden, reactive shifts in strategy and technology, financial security feels more out of reach than ever. And where the ultimate aspiration is to have a steady salary, “officecore” is essentially capitalism realism – a term coined by cultural critic Mark Fisher for our inability to imagine a world beyond capitalism – dressed up as fashion.

In his 2006 book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, anthropologist Alexei Yurchak observes Russia’s “Last Soviet Generation”: youth who grew up as the communist world system death-spiralled, who cosplayed, yet also submitted, to Soviet citizenship and its ridiculous ideological cues. Because they could no longer imagine an alternative.

In that sense, the office siren is really the siren song of the Last Corporate Generation. For us, it’s simply easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. So, we do the only thing adults can do: play dress-up.