Blazers in the Club
Corporate-Core and the Separation of Work and Life
By Emily
I got glasses. For a couple of reasons, none of which are the improvement of my eyesight. If anything, glasses probably reduce the quality of my eyesight—unlike my eyeballs, they come with the propensity to acquire smudges, or to fog from my hot breath in the cold.1
If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I recently got into ties. I got into glasses for a similar set of reasons.
Glasses lend me an air of seriousness I do not otherwise possess.
They communicate an erudition: a scholarliness. They suggest intellect. In old portraits, some people chose to be shown wearing glasses to demonstrate their literacy, which was a marker of class and status. I’m attempting something of the same—I want people to look at me and think omg I bet that girl is soooo literate.
I love creating ensembles which forcibly direct the gaze of a viewer, their eyes snagging on an exaggerated proportion or a strikingly bold lip. Glasses bring focus to my eyes, making them the emphasis of my face. I can’t wear eye makeup cause it looks like shit on me (lmao),2 but with glasses, I can unlock a new focal point (hah).
Both of my new accessories—ties and glasses—fit within the emergent corporate-core trend. The girlies are out here looking cute in deconstructed button-downs and ties. One element of the trend that especially fascinates me is where it is worn. I witnessed corp-core in action at the club in my hometown in November.3 While half of the party-goers at this particular venue were clad in what was the going-out standard during my time in college (light wash jeans and a black top), the other half were dressed in what can only be described as little business outfits.
Tight, knee-high, platform-heeled black boots, usually patent leather. Black semi-opaque tights. Short tight skirts and fitted sweaters. There were blazers, there were headbands, there was even a particularly preppy duo in matching tights-shorts-turtleneck combos who looked like they were trying to conjure the ghost of Spencer Hastings. Makeup: “natural.” Hair: professionally highlighted, uniformly tousled soft curls, à la Dyson Air Wrap infamy. I saw one woman wearing a sweater vest in the straightest way possible. Like, how do you look straight in a sweater vest??
What does it mean that corporate-core is making its way into the club? Isn’t the club supposed to be the opposite of the office? French sociologist Jean Baudrillard can give us some insight into the illusory nature of the separation between work and play. He articulates the way these “opposite realms” are actually part of one whole, and how the phantasm of the “private domain” “reserved for leisure” is used to justify “all the contradictions of the economy and of politics”. We hear this in the common line that if work is stressing you out, well, then, that’s only because you’re not doing a good enough job of “maintaining work/life boundaries,” and you really should just get better at “leaving your job at your desk.” With the pandemic-fueled increase in work-from-home jobs, there’s been a growing conversation about how possible it really is to “leave your job at your desk” when your desk might be two feet away from your bed.
The phantasm of leisure provides justification and compensation for corporate working culture, making it a crucial element of that very working culture. Leisure time is literally defined by its relation to work; it is its opposite. In the words of Baudrillard, work and leisure, the public and private domain, are in negative reciprocal relation to one another. Work conditions the possibilities of leisure time.
Baudrillard expands on the effect of the closely intertwined relationship of work and leisure: “The disconnection between paradise and hell is that people can only dream of a paradise in the vision of their hell.”4 This negative reciprocal relation between work and leisure works to shrink the horizons of what we’re capable of imagining as possible, creating a situation in which our working lives inflect the structure and the appearance of our non-working lives. Following this, we can only dream of the club in the vision of the office, and we can only dream of club attire in the image of the corporate uniform.
I remember pretending, at the age of five, to be somebody’s secretary. I had a corded toy phone—well, it was a real phone, but it wasn’t connected to a line—covered in magenta feathers and heart-shaped rhinestones. I would sit alone at the desk in my bedroom, with the upright posture my grandma tried to instill in me, and field make-believe calls, make transfers and take notes, putting imaginary businesspeople on hold. My childlike play manifested in the form of work. I was rehearsing work, practicing a way of inhabiting my body and the world in ways that I’d internalized (from where?) as the proper form of corporate comportment.
Why was five year old me spending time acting like I had a desk job? Why do we sit students at desks for eight hours a day when all they want to do is squirm—who decided that that was the best way for them to learn, and why? Because it is the best way for them to learn something, just not the course material. The structure of public education is such that young people internalize the “everyday routine” of desk work.5 The habits of work permeate every layer of the ‘private domain’ that they’re supposed to be separate from; “Doubled in work and leisure, the everyday routine organizes each share in the same way.”6 My play took the form of a routine that I had somehow absorbed as the activity of ‘work.’ By five I’d learned this, never having been in an office building and without anyone ever explicitly telling me that an office job was something I should start preparing myself for.
Look at the other tools I was given for my play: Barbie dolls, immensely popular toys whose identities are their jobs: Astronaut Barbie, Teacher Barbie, Doctor Barbie. And what differentiates Firefighter Barbie from Scientist Barbie? Her clothes, of course. All Barbie has to do is swing on a lab coat or pick up a briefcase and suddenly she becomes a new person, a new kind of professional. The message Barbie tells us is clear: you are your job, and your job is what you wear. If you’ve got the capital you can purchase the uniform, buying legitimacy through your participation in barbed-wire global supply chains, those relentlessly ‘optimized’ accordion-folders of exploitation.
This isn’t the first time that cosplaying yuppies has been in vogue. I remember traipsing down the hallways of my middle school in stretchy pencil skirts and Uggs, rocking peplum blouses with statement necklaces. Probably my ensembles were teenybopper pantomimes of what the girlies were wearing to their corporate jobs (maybe sans Uggs…), done in cheap Forever 21 viscose and the kind of “metal” that stains your skin7. And I certainly wasn’t in the club at the age of 12, but if the music videos of the time are to be believed, people were wearing (sexy) versions of these kinds of outfits while they bobbed their heads to recession-core music and like…did drugs? Made love in this club? Just danced? Party rocked?
But, like, yay! Corporate-core is back! Its grey luxury sedan slides right into the (reserved) parking spot next to stealth wealth’s Bentley and old money’s Rolls Royce, other aesthetics characterized by stolid silhouettes and the overt centering of capitalism.8 It’s sleek, it’s muted, it's focused. It’s a little conservative, but well-paid, so it’s still sexy. It’s giving ‘back to the office!’ initiatives, it’s giving business as usual (emphasis on the business). But if getting dressed everyday is playing dress-up, but the “play” is putting on business attire…well, Baudrillard’s points are writing themselves.
Corp-core’s professedly agnostic construction pays tribute to Capital, the God under which our One Nation sprawls. Blazers in the club: exposing the truth of the domain “reserved for leisure.” Much like the separation of church and state, the separation of work and life is a false ideal, a promise that can’t be kept, but one that will sure as hell send you spinning on a rollercoaster of denial, gaslighting, and slanted promises that never ever ever bear out. And they’re getting worse at hiding it. My corporate office is kitted out with Mario Kart, hard alcohol, and a standing arcade game we use as a speaker podium. I know a guy who worked for Google and considered living in his car in the parking lot instead of getting an apartment, because the Google compound has been built to meet almost every essential need for daily life. The all new company town, featuring video games and Hippeas. Come, come play, come work. Woohoo!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m into corp-core. Lots of designers are doing interesting things with proportion, dipping toes or sliding feet into the water of the uncanny, of perversion, taking the aesthetic codes of corporate wear to disruptive extremes.
Let’s circle back9 to Baudrillard’s comments on the way work/life circumscribes our imagination, rendering a situation in which “people can only dream of a paradise in the vision of their hell.” I don’t know about you, but I’m kinda interested in something beyond the vision of my hell. So how can we combat this imaginative circumscription, this limiting of possibilities? Queerness may provide us some respite. In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes on the utopian function of queerness. Queerness insists on more, insists on other, insists on the future, the “then and there”: “We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”10 The best examples of corp-core (read: NOT what the girlies were wearing in the club) manage to interrogate and to challenge corporate codes of aesthetics. Within the context of this piece, the images we’ve created for it attempt to queer corporate-core; in them I participate in a trend I’ve just spent over a thousand words deconstructing, teasing it apart thread by thread. I take it apart, I get to put it back together —blazer over tights over a knowing smirk and the roll of an eye.
That’s what play is, isn’t it? Taking apart. Putting together. Dressing and undressing your Barbie dolls, donning and doffing professional identities, acting and re-acting out roles in endless stories. I’m trying to get there, out towards that “horizon imbued with potentiality.” throwing punches at a camera wearing a dress over a mock neck over trousers, with berry-stained lips and fake glasses. That outfit—I actually did wear it to work. Ironically, the best examples of corp-core are actually disjunctive in an office, as they challenge or pervert corporate codes of dress.
When I wore that outfit, I still had to be in the office, yes, but I got to bring my own slice of possibility to live in. I got to feel the poetry of the drape of fabric, got to create discomfort and confusion that maybe made my coworkers reflect anew on what they were wearing. I even got to feel connected to the anticipatory striving of five-year-old Emily and her fuchsia feathered telephone, sending out calls to nowhere, in her mind, going everywhere.
~Post Script~
If you’re participating in the trend, here are some questions upon which you may chew: how do you feel when you slip on your blazer or your button-down? What lines of desire are you tracing, what affectations and modes of comportment are you taking into your body? How do you feel when you move, how do you feel about the way others perceive you in this kind of attire, who are the avatars pitching to meeting rooms and firing off emails in your corporate aesthetic imaginary? If you don’t work a corporate job, what ideas about corporate aesthetics are you playing with as you’re wearing these clothes, and what’s your stake in them? If you are a corporate girl, how does wearing these clothes feel in relation to your work, your labor?
PPS: Please, as ever when participating in trends, buy second hand, recycle things from your wardrobe, steal from your friend’s or neighbor’s or great-aunt’s closet, but by god don’t get on shein.com and order a skirt suit because exploitative production isn’t ever cute in fact it is actively harmful. As Baudrillard would say, fast fashion is no fashion at all. (just kidding he never said that) (but maybe he would have, you know?)
I’m kind of ok with this. I don’t need to see everything, you know?
This isn’t me fishing for compliments—it actually does lol. I have hooded eyes so eyeshadow just gets everywhere. But I’ve made my peace with the fact that I’ll never be able to rock a smoky eye.
The place I’m talking about isn’t technically a club. It is literally called “Bar,” But it has a separate section with a huge dance floor, club lights, and what’s undoubtedly a clubby vibe (gropey men bopping their heads without much rhythm, girls climbing a metal structure to gyrate on high, sticky floors, DJs who hate receiving requests.)
Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred, 39.
I tried not to bring Althusser into this, because one French guy is enough, you know? But he is here. So this is my lazy acknowledgement of his presence. Ok? Good.
Baudrillard, 39.
“such an upsetting time of fashion. why was I dressed like a sexy librarian when I was 14” -H.
Of course, every trend and even the idea of a ‘trend’ relates to capitalism and the cyclical way consumerism manufactures needs/desires to purchase commodities, but stealth wealth and corporate-core are literally defined by the fact that they are the aesthetics of possessing or actively pursuing the possession of financial capital.
Synergy! Optimization!
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.