French pop star Yseult’s new music video opens with what looks like surveillance footage of an office. A middle-aged woman playing a first-person shooter game on her PC abruptly throws her monitor on the office’s carpeted floor and flips off the camera.
Yseult enters, stomping down a wood-paneled hallway, as a menacing office dominatrix who later threatens her employees with a golf club.
The palette for the video, called “B---- You Could Never,” is a rainbow of grays, neutrals and woodgrain, but the action is all lust, folly and destruction. It’s like a scene from a Godard film stripped of its color saturation.
End of carouselIf this music video reminds you of the Marc Jacobs promotional clips from earlier this year that featured Lil Uzi Vert sweeping his keyboard to the floor before dancing on a cubicle desk or the one of FKA Twigs undulating in an open-plan office, that’s because they were all directed by the Paris-based filmmaker Yulya Shadrinsky.
Shadrinsky’s original concept for Marc Jacobs was to shoot outside, but the designer’s team insisted that the clips be shot in the company’s actual office. The clips caught the eye of Yseult, who approached Shadrinsky and her team to make an office video of her own.
The images of people losing it in a drab office struck a nerve with viewers. “What’s funny is we got so much feedback after the video from people saying they always wished to do something like this,” Shadrinsky said. “It’s the dream thing, the fantasy.”
Advertisement
Yseult’s video bears a striking resemblance to the 2021 Macy Rodman video for “Ugly B----,” directed by Harry James Hanson, which also features a tyrannical girlboss wreaking emotional havoc, office drones throwing themselves on the floor and repeated use of the b-word.
Shadrinsky said she wasn’t aware of Rodman’s video and Rodman was not bothered by the similarities between her video and Yseult’s. “Oooh this is the video we WANTED to make, Brava!” she wrote to me via an Instagram DM. A few days later, she sent a link to yet another new music video featuring workplace misbehavior, this one from the Los Angeles duo Trashworld.
“It’s trending honey!” Rodman wrote.
What’s trending, exactly? It seems to be a new, chaotic iteration of the buttoned-up “office siren” look. Maybe we call this version … Panic! At the Office. Or manager monster? Girlboss Godzilla? Office demon?
Advertisement
In one sense, monstrosity fits in nicely with the concept of a “siren.” Today, sirens of myth are usually depicted as seductive women with gorgeous singing voices, but in antiquity, they were often portrayed as human-headed birds or creatures with rooster heads and fish bodies. I doubt these versions were on the mood boards of the stylists who got excited about “office sirens” earlier this year.
Much has already been written about the “office siren” aesthetic, a formalized and slightly grown-up permutation of last year’s fashion fixation on all things “girlhood.” “Office siren” could be called “sexy secretary,” with all the retrograde and sexist tropes of a boss making advances to a receptive receptionist.
Starting in the 1940s, pinup artists such as Gil Elvgren created fantasy images of female office workers revealing lingerie beneath their pencil skirts. Recently, celebrities such as Maisie Williams, Bella Hadid and Jennifer Lawrence have toyed with looks that blend gray suiting with sex appeal. The writer Hannah Jackson rightfully asked in Vogue whether women were in on the “joke” of the office siren aesthetic.
Advertisement
In the case of the music video by Trashworld, the jokes are obvious and the innuendo becomes overt. It’s funny that a video set in the workplace would be NSFW, but it also makes sense. As all media has become more permissive and profane, the workplace is one of the last places where swear words and salty talk still shock. And it’s not surprising that artists would be interested in exploring the taboo of post-#MeToo workplace sexuality.
But the office demon vibe is more chaotic than erotic. In these videos, they’re ripping off their clothes, but they’re also ripping up paper, breaking pencils and — at the end of the Yseult video — toppling shelves stocked with office supplies.
The women in these offices are not coy pinups. They’re more like the protagonists in Mike Judge’s 1999 comedy, “Office Space,” who vent their frustrations with corporate drudgery by bludgeoning a printer with a baseball bat. They’re freaking out.
And there’s certainly a lot to freak out about, with an economic system that favors the old and rich over the young and poor, employers who are continually squeezing more work out of fewer people, and multiple industries facing the existential threats of artificial intelligence and the gig economy.
“If you’re an L.A. creative, you’re feeling the pressure like you’ve never felt before,” said director Patrick Liam, who shot the Trashworld music video on a shoestring budget.
Advertisement
“Everyone’s got three day jobs,” Liam said. “You used to just work at a restaurant for two shifts and party the rest of the week. That’s long over.” Liam makes ends meet as a software engineer. He says his workplace frustrations and those of his peers inspired his work.
“It’s the visual irony of being as wild as possible at an office when that would never happen, because I can’t even get a bathroom break without signing in the minutes of why I’m leaving my desk,” he said.
Segments of the fashion world may be moving past a seductive fantasy of workwear to a more disheveled iteration of the office. Ssense, the online retailer and media company that promoted corporatecore looks several months ago, listed “Corporate Rave” as one of the nascent trends of summer 2024.
Steff Yotka, the head of content at Ssense, was part of the team that coined “Corporate Rave.” “There’s something happening where these abandoned office buildings are becoming avenues for art and culture,” she said, citing an art show by Christopher Wool held in an abandoned office.
“We’ve come through the conversation in mainstream culture about return to office, and I think there’s maybe a forked path,” Yotka said. “The office becomes a desolate space, like an abandoned mall, or the office becomes a perfect third place, where you’re turning it into a space you actually want to be. That’s what we were trying to promote with ‘Office Rave.’”
Advertisement
Sounds nice. But, then, all raves must eventually end. And when the sun rises and the serotonin dips, the mood changes. Yotka pointed me to a white dress shirt by Ottolinger that had been deliberately burned at the cuffs and hem. It’s office burnout rendered literal.
Alessandro Michele and Harry Styles were serving “morning-after corporate rave” when they hit the streets of Rome recently looking as if they had kept an office party going until sunrise, their chinos baggy and their shirts untucked. This week’s Balenciaga runway show in Shanghai could have been titled “Office Demon,” with its imposing oversize black blazers paired with towering goth platforms.
The men’s suit may be in decline, but a rumpled version of white-collar workwear seems to be on the rise. It could be a look that acknowledges the dystopian complexities of earning money under late capitalism.
At the very least, it’s an improvement over the fleece quarter-zip.
correction
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Paris-based filmmaker Yulya Shadrinsky in two subsequent references. The article has been corrected.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMC1xcueZmtoYml8cYKOaWhop5abtqSxjJqcrKyYmsGqr4yfmKygmaS7brnUrKCcZaaesaa70mg%3D