021 Corporate sleaze
The Boom Boom to fur is back pipeline, neckties and do we know how to dress for the office - or be a person?
Michelle Pfeiffer, shot by David Sims for Saint Laurent. No notes!
Fur was everywhere at fashion month, a US Office of Personnel employee got fired for her OOOTD (office outfit of the day) selfies when her agency began rounds of layoffs and ‘old Hollywood glamour’ is the only acceptable red carpet ensemble for hopeful starlets. Oh baby, it’s Boom Boom.
Trend forecaster Sean Monahan - AKA the guy who gave us ‘normcore’ and elevated Jerry Seinfeld to style icon (still is) and the ‘vibe shift’ - coined Boom Boom as an elastic catch-all for the rude truth that you don’t need to pretend you’re not rich anymore!
He touched on it again during Paris Fashion Month when the shoulders and the heels were high and the stocks were low. He says how he and Interview editor Mel Ottenberg clocked how Saint Laurent’s perfect Michelle Pfeiffer campaign was everywhere, and maybe prescient.
“The editor of Interview Magazine, Mel Ottenberg saw the parallels though: “It really is wild how eighties power dressing is all the rage on the runways, in popular culture…and then tonight we had Saint Laurent, which was giving full Yves Saint Laurent 1987…but also the stock market is crashing?” 1987 famously being the year when Black Monday knocked almost two trillion off stock market balance sheets worldwide.”
Anyway, forget ‘quiet luxury’ (yuk!) when billionaires are catapulting to space. Now we have ‘Republican hair,’ and American Psycho is getting a remake, high heels are back and ‘office siren’ is everywhere - from “respectable up top, dirty down below” suiting at Saint Laurent and Haider Ackermann’s sensual debut for Tom Ford, languid suiting intended for the “morning after.” It’s Carrie Bradshaw chasing after Mr Big in ways that we can now see are deranged wearing his white shirt. It’s the fact that Carrie, everybody, kind of wants a guy in finance?
Carrie Bradshaw, pretty boom boom! Image: HBO
What about everybody knowing that the status watches on The White Lotus - the ultimate rich people behaving badly - signify something about them? At least with The White Lotus we know there will be some consequences? Or will there? Maybe not! Maybe fortune favours the gauche!
(Read my interview with the show’s costumer designer on Vogue - she literally scrolled through the photos people tagged at five star resorts!)
What else? Oh, Gen Z is corporate cosplaying and everybody is wearing neckties, but not for the office. Nobody knows how to dress for the office anymore but they know where the good light is (in most offices this is “nowhere!”). Nice girls don’t get the corner office anyway, we all know that by now.
As Emilia Petraca noted in The Cut of the Boom Boom mood you can see everywhere if you’re looking,
“As runway collections are conceived of months in advance, I wondered if boom boom, like Trump voters, had been right under our noses for a while, quietly gaining ground. Maybe the “mob wife” aesthetic was the writing on the wall. Or perhaps this turn to the ostentatious was the natural next step in style’s constant progress, following the comeback of J.Crew and its “old money” look and The Row’s beige choke hold on actually wealthy American women — turning up the volume on quiet luxury until it was no longer quiet and then really very loud. When Balenciaga sent out fake wads of cash as invites for its spring 2023 show, was that a warning sign? Or when Kim Kardashian was named GQ’s Tycoon of the Year and covered the December 2023 issue wearing an oversize suit and tie? As conventional wisdom goes, five years into a decade is when it really becomes a decade. So here we are: the 2020s. Succession teed it up. Now, Playboy is back in print and an American Psycho remake is on the way. It’s no longer gauche to be bougie and brash. Online retailer Ssense currently sells a $55 T-shirt that reads YOU’RE A SLAVE TO MONEY THEN YOU DIE. The purists here are the butt of the joke.”
We weren’t meant to aspire to the lives of anybody in Industry and Succession, Meghan Markle (Sussex?) as Caitlin Moran noted has sad eyes as she sprinkles dried flowers on everything while everybody says she’s out of touch with the times? But what are these times? Will they sell? Are they boom boom?
A book I am DESPERATE to read
Graydon Carter’s memoir about the absolute glory days of magazines, of course. Obsessed with this writer’s rare candour in revealing he was paid more than $498, 000 (USD!) to write three articles a year.
I also liked this line from Carter to the malcontents he was firing, that they had confused kindness with weakness. It’s absolutely not the same thing!
A book I inhaled
Curtis Sittenfeld’s book of short stories, Show Don’t Tell. I don’t usually love short stories but these - middle aged yearning really spoke to me… Also to be reunited with Lee Fiora at her boarding school reunion? Ooft, reading Prep for the first time as an out-of-place 20 year-old was like being turned inside out.
Love, Annie xx