everybody's obsessed with the retro corporate aesthetic

- This video is brought to you by Squarespace,  an all-in-one platform for building a brand and  

growing your business online. Coming to you live  from our New York City headquarters, this is your  

CEO speaking. My name is Mina Le, and welcome  new hirees! And on this channel, we talk about,  

or sorry, in this company, we talk about fashion,  culture and media. So in case you missed it,  

Monica Lewinsky became the face of Reformation's  February, 2024 campaign, "You've Got the Power,"  

which generated more than $2 million in media  exposure. The purpose of the campaign was to  

call to action for voter registration. Monica  Lewinsky is an anti-bullying activist. She's  

a writer and a producer, though she first made  headlines as the 22-year-old White House intern,  

who Bill Clinton had an 18-month long affair with  during his presidency. This is all made public  

in 1998, and of course, because this was the 90s,  the Wall Street Journal referred to her in print,  

as "a little tart." And Maureen Dowd won a  Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Lewinsky,  

in which she called her, "a ditsy, predatory White  House intern." An intern being predatory towards  

the President. Love to hear it. Don't you miss  90s media, everyone? Lewinsky has talked at length  

of how the negative press coverage affected her  life afterwards. In 2021, she told the Hollywood  

Reporter, "Just because I wasn't on the news  every night for 20 years in the same way that I  

was in 1998, doesn't mean that the story ended. 10  years on, I still could not get a job. I couldn't  

support myself." In the last several years, some  feminists have revisited the Clinton-Lewinsky  

scandal and specifically, the press's treatment of  Monica. As Helen Rumbelow writes for the Times UK,  

"Those in their 50s now reflect on their younger  selves watching the slut-shaming vilification of  

a peer and doing nothing, or joining in. Those in  their teens and 20s are meeting Lewinsky afresh  

as the patron saint of young women whose lives  were casually ruined by rapacious men in power."  

The Reformation Collection is inspired by office  workwear, with Monica wearing a button-down blouse  

tie and matching waist coat and skirt, and a few  photos posed in an office space overlooking the  

city skyline. She's no longer giving intern,  she's giving boss, but like in a cool, sexy,  

retro way, and not in a cringey 2016 lean-in, girl  boss, kinda way. This was a really smart move for  

Reformation, in my opinion. And the reason there  was such a good response is in part because of  

the modern reframing of Lewinsky's story. And also  because of the trending silhouettes of the actual  

clothing collection. Today I wanna talk about  the incorporation of office wear in fashion these  

days. How we got here, and what this means for us.  Despite what this video is about, we aren't in the  

1980s anymore, and most people who work need to  have a website. And Squarespace makes the process  

as simple as possible. Squarespace offers pre-made  templates to get you started, but don't feel  

stifled. Once you select one, you can personalize  it however you want, so that your page reflects  

the uniqueness of your business. If you have  products to sell, you can easily open your store  

native with Squarespace's tools to sell anything  from physical products to downloadable products  

to memberships. And Squarespace also makes it easy  for you to engage with your clients through their  

email newsletter feature. You can introduce your  brand, your work, or yourself to new subscribers  

with welcome emails, or send announcements for an  upcoming sale, or let your top customers know of  

a secret discount code. Check out squarespace.com  for a free trial and when you're ready to launch,  

go to squarespace.com/minale to get 10% off  your first purchase of a website or a domain.

- It makes me wish I had a job.

- I've seen so many terms getting tossed  around. Office siren, corporate fetish,  

geek chic, corpcore, businesscore, among  other names, to describe what's happening  

in fashion right now. That is the prevalence of  neutrals, especially the color gray, button-ups,  

blazers, pantsuits, pencil skirts and ties on  the runway. I think the term corporate fetish,  

which was dubbed by writer Emily Sundberg,  is the term I vibe with the most.

- That's the one!

- It encapsulates the general cultural lure  of office wear today and is less defined by  

individual trends like Bayonetta glasses. Sundberg  describes the phenomena as this. "The corporate  

fetish is when people glamorize the idea of an  office, the water cooler conversations, getting  

dressed, actually dressed, dry-cleaner-pick-up  dressed, for an eight to seven job, and spinning  

around in a desk chair. This is all while  office occupancy hovers around 50% in New  

York." In comparison, the office siren look is  very specific, and is underneath the corporate  

fetish umbrella, but mostly takes from early 2000s  fashion trends, like Bayonetta glasses, button up  

blouses that are buttoned down to the cleavage to  reveal a little pushup bra, tight pencil skirts,  

and slingback kitten or stiletto heels. But in  actuality, what's happening in the culture goes  

beyond the early 2000s to also include a lot of  1980s and 1990s elements as well. For example,  

back in the Fall of 2022, Byrdie put out an  article called, "Why is Every Fashion Girl Dressed  

like Patrick Bateman Right Now?" Well, Patrick  Bateman, the lead character of the movie "American  

Psycho," did debut in the popular zeitgeist  in the year 2000. The movie actually takes  

place in the 1980s and costume designer, Isis  Mussenden, did a fantastic job, in my opinion.

- Don't tell me, don't tell me, let  me guess. Mm, Valentino couture.

- She dressed Christian Bale and his colleagues  in couture suits to underscore the late 1980s  

boom economy and its corresponding self-obsessed  Wall Street culture. She said in an interview,  

"The Italian house of Cerruti sent me the  catalogs of their collections from those days,  

and I chose some designs which they then remade  from the original patterns." As just a fun fact,  

the film actually had issues with designer  labels because of the subject matter,  

the murderous subject matter. Cerruti only agreed  to let Christian Bale wear their clothes when his  

character was not killing someone, and Comme  des Garcons apparently refused to allow one  

of their overnight bags to be used to carry  a corpse. So they used Jean Paul Gaultier  

instead. Gaultier would definitely be down  for this movie, which I think is so hilarious.

- Where did you get that overnight bag?

- Jean Paul Gaultier.

- "American Psycho" is also based on the  Bret Easton Ellis book of the same name.  

And in the book, Patrick Bateman is equally, if  not more obsessed with clothing. And he and his  

coworkers regularly discuss fashion trends with  each other. I skimmed through this book on my  

Kindle because I don't think I have the stomach to  actually read this. I've just, I don't know, I've  

just heard that it's really sadistic and violent  and much worse than the movie. And once again,  

I have a weak stomach. I couldn't even watch  "Game of Thrones," so I didn't read it. But I  

found a blog where the writer, Kyle Barbeau,  tried to chronicle all mentions of branded  

clothing in the book and found over 60 mentions  before giving up. Spoiler, most of the items are  

Armani. Bateman also wears a 1980s, two-toned  Rolex Datejust 16013, which he references in  

the movie as well. But the one Christian Bale  actually wears is a dupe, the Seiko SNXJ90,  

because Rolex didn't wanna be on the wrist of a  serial killer. Which, you know, can we blame them?  

It's not the best endorsement. If only they knew  how impactful "American Psycho" would be today,  

in terms of fashion. I'm gonna read a passage here  from the book regarding one of Bateman's suits,  

to give a sense of how detailed Ellis gets with  these style descriptions. "The suit I wear today  

is from Alan Flusser. It's an 80s drape suit,  which is an updated version of the 30s style. The  

favored version has extended natural shoulders,  a full chest and a bladed back. The soft-rolled  

lapel should be about four inches wide with the  peak finishing three quarters of the way across  

the shoulders. Properly used on double-breasted  suits, peaked lapels are considered more elegant  

than notched ones." He keeps going, but I think  you get the gist. As you can see in the movie,  

Bateman wears a Valentino dinner jacket  that has the 1930s-esque double-breasted,  

peaked lapel design he mentions. This is all super  in line with actual 1980s formal wear. By the way,  

GQ's December, 1984, Annual Formal Wear  Review, states, "To be sure, the 30s remain the  

inspiration. Double-breasted dinner jackets with  peaked satin, or grosgrain lapels." So I mean,  

Ellis definitely did do his research. There's  also a gym outfit featured in the book that's  

not in the movie that's lifted entirely from  the May, 1988 issue of GQ. Bateman narrates,  

"I slip into a pair of crow-black cotton and Lycra  shorts with a white waistband and side stripes  

and a cotton and Lycra tank top, both by Wilkes,  which can be folded so tightly that I can actually  

carry them in my briefcase." Honestly, I would've  loved to see this outfit in the movie. But let's  

get back to the present day runway. At the most  recent New York Fashion Week, Luar's collection,  

which featured broad shouldered tops and jackets  was inspired by designer Raul Lopez's childhood  

people-watching the corporate crew on Fifth  Avenue and Wall Street. The luxury knitwear  

brand, The Elder Statesman, based their recent  campaign on New York City's corporate culture as  

well. According to Emily Sundberg, who messaged  the brand's Creative Director, Bailey Hunter,  

the theme was "American Psycho." The campaign also  shot in the WSA, an old office building that's  

getting revamped by the hospitality management  company, Happier People. WSA IG bio currently  

reads, "A new downtown hub blurring the lines  of the arts, production, working space, food,  

play and culture. An 80s icon." The vintage office  space itself is of course included in this larger  

corporate trend and we can see it as a backdrop  of many other campaigns, including Balenciaga's  

Spring 2023 campaign, the Skims Ultimate Nipple  Bra campaign, and following Kim Kardashian GQ  

photo shoot, the Lewinsky Reformation campaign,  Boyish Beauty's Brow Duo campaign, among others.  

I'd even include campaigns that embrace the clunky  lo-fi UI seen on old computers as part of this  

trend. Corporate fetish has gone so far as to  include commuting culture, dubbed by Harper's  

Bazaar as "Commuter Core," which I honestly  think this is just like splitting the atom at  

this point, and I think it's a fake term. Because  I literally haven't seen this term used anywhere,  

and I looked on TikTok hashtags, couldn't find  anything. But apparently, commuter core refers  

to the messy unpolished vibe of a working girl.  Like what she looks like before she even steps  

into the office. Like all core aesthetics, it's a  romanticized version, so this working girl is not  

a girl working an entry-level job who can't afford  a taxi. She's inherently a cool girl at the start  

of her adult life. Features of the style include  large bags, hoodies under blazers, wrinkled trench  

coats and sneakers. If you've seen the 1998 movie  "Working Girl," the main character, Tess McGill,  

iconically switches her white sneakers for pumps  while at the office, showcasing the reality of  

many commuting women of her time. The so-called  "commuter core" is a fetishization of her with  

the sneakers still on. Miu Miu's Fall/Winter 2024  runway show hail the commuter girl with their big  

leather top handle bags seemingly loaded to the  brim with so much stuff that they're too heavy to  

carry by the handles. New York designer, Jane  Wade, even titled her Spring 2024 collection,  

"The Commute," saying that she was inspired by  her own experience working in corporate fashion.

- Oh, so you're wearing a suit?

- What's it gotta do with you?

- [Mina] It's been customary for people  to wear professional outfits long before  

the 1980s. But Patricia Cunningham notes  the 1970s as a major shift for women's  

fashion in the workplace. Because  more women were joining than ever  

before. So the question was, "What  should women wear to the office?"

- I don't know what to wear.

- Ever?

- John Molloy stepped up with an answer. Don't you  love it when a man steps up to answer? He actually  

published two manuals, "Dress For Success,"  in 1975, for men, and the women's version,  

"The Woman's Dress For Success Book," in  1977. In the woman's guide, Molloy emphasized  

that a woman's outfit choice could be the reason  for her success or her failure in the workplace.  

He wrote this scathing critique of the fashion  industry in his introduction, which I thought  

was really funny. "A society in which the people  in power are intent on keeping women barefoot,  

pregnant, and as far from the boardroom as  possible cannot design clothes for women who  

have serious executive ambitions. The fact that  the fashion industry's big number of the mid-1970s  

was the peasant dress, often made with the yards  of taffeta, shows how out of step the fashion  

industry really is. And while the Europeans  design clothes that will keep you at home,  

the Americans are churning out garments that  will keep you in the secretarial pool." Honestly,  

reading some of the chapters in this book,  Molloy was actually way more progressive than  

I thought he would be. His book for woman largely  supported the same standards and methods he used  

in his book for men. The main idea for whatever  gender, was that you should dress as if you were  

already successful. His ideal uniform consisted of  a skirted suit and blouse, preferably a dark suit  

with a light colored blouse. And the skirt should  be slightly below knee length with natural color  

pantyhose and simple pumps. Accessory options  include a feminine fedora, a contrasting scarf,  

a plain wristwatch, and a leather attache  case. Where he majorly flops is his attitude  

towards pants. Molloy wrote, "In most business  offices, the pantsuit is a failure outfit."

- That is enough. And shut up. I hate you.

- Well, this attitude towards pants comes across  as really annoying, especially today. Molloy was  

actually pretty tame in comparison to other men  of his era, which tells you all you need to know  

about men in that era. In the 1970s, there were  actual offices, schools, and even restaurants that  

forbade women from wearing pants. As a response  to the changing political climate, women protested  

and some filed lawsuits against their employers,  arguing that not allowing women to wear pants but  

allowing men to do so violated Title VII of  the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed sex  

discrimination in employment. In response, many  employers start to allow pantsuits and even mini  

skirts as acceptable office attire. So it's been  like a six decades of corporate pantsuit-hood for  

women, but suits are still a masculine coated  garment. Probably because men have just been  

wearing suits for a lot longer. They've basically  been wearing some version of the suit ever since  

"The Great Masculine Renunciation," which is a  very funnily named phenomena coined by John Carl  

Flugel to describe men's widespread adoption  of plain dress at the end of the 18th century.  

Because in case you forgot, Western men used to  dress like this. The suit also carried an air  

of authority, discipline, and rigidness, traits  associated with masculinity in the post-war era.  

James F. Bere, a former chief executive who worked  in the 1950s, once told a reporter, "We were all  

the same way. We all wore white shirts with our  suits. The thing here, the tie, is one of the  

craziest things ever invented. The symbolism of  the tie had some elitism in it. It told the world  

that you were a manager. The suit was mandatory.  It never even entered my mind to challenge that.  

It was just what we did. We never complained about  wearing uniforms in the Army, so we certainly  

weren't going to complain about wearing suits in  the business world. What you had to understand  

about that time is that when the boss said, "Be  there," you were there. You were totally committed  

to your job. Your responsibility was to be there.  No excuses." There was a moment in the late 60s  

and 70s where suits and overall dress became  more individualized, however. You can see this  

progression really clearly in the period TV show,  my favorite TV show, "Mad Men," which spans the  

entirety of the 1960s. At the start of the show,  all the businessmen are wearing their identical  

gray flannel suits. And by the end of the show,  there are characters like Stan Rizzo, who comes  

to the office in more relaxed, colorful attire.  Much of the return to drab colors and standardized  

dress can be, in my opinion, just like the result  of trend cycles. Even though John Molloy gets  

a lot of credit for suggesting classic dress in  the workplace, before he even published his book,  

classic suits were already on the rise. For  example, at the Dallas Convention Center in 1974,  

the middle-of-the-market buyers, 60% of the  market, were shunning the more contemporary  

Shantung jumpsuits and patchwork jackets, and  heading for safer classics. Blue blazers, gray  

slacks and button-down shirts. And Forbes reported  that suit sales jumped 4.4% in 1976, with classic  

suits even being purchased by the guy who never  bought a suit in his life. They noted that even  

the vested suit was making a comeback. Molloy's  book and other advice books were probably so well  

received also because the economy was booming.  And more people were hungry to be climbing up the  

corporate ladder. But let's get back to women. If  you are a woman, how are you going to climb that  

corporate ladder? Jennifer Paff Ogle and Mary Lynn  Damhorst analyzed business dress advice for women  

from 84 magazines and newspaper articles published  from 1986 to 1994. And found that there was  

actually a lot of conflicting advice on whether or  not you should wear sexy clothing to the office.

- Your outfit.

- What? What's wrong with my outfit?

- [Mina] Some authors said that wearing blatantly  suggestive dress increased a woman's chances of  

harassment, increased chances of rumors alleging  that the wearer's success was based on something  

other than her job performance, if you catch  my drift. And that woman should just not rely  

upon their feminine wiles to get ahead in the  workplace because they have so many other skills,  

like intellect, creativity, and competence. The  articles that were pro-suggestive dress claimed  

that a woman should use all her available  resources to reach success. And that at  

some point, women should be able to depart  from the male standards of conduct, which I  

guess include looking unsexy, once they got their  footing in the business. Regardless, there was  

a general consensus that women should develop a  personal style because looking extremely drab or  

conservative is often boring and doesn't make you  stand out in front of all the other people working  

this job. And women should therefore use their  appearance in some way to help them move up the  

career ladder. Even though magazines and companies  go out of their way to shell out products,  

and a lot of this advice could be seen as attempts  to promote consumerism, there's actually truth in  

how important it is to dress appropriately for  the office. At least, pre-pandemic. Nowadays, I  

think it's more important to at least know how to  dress appropriately from the torso up. **Samira Guerra

wrote about how the corporate  dress code is a way of exercising control over  

workers. In 2015, they talked to a 30-something  year old market researcher named Heather, who  

lived in London. Her company had a casual Friday  dress code, where they could wear jeans. However,  

Heather said, "On these days, I wouldn't probably  get up as much and walk around because I'm  

conscious of the fact that I'm wearing jeans and  I don't want people to notice and it doesn't look  

professional." Heather also talked about a former  colleague who once received a letter from HR about  

how her revealing dresses were inappropriate. The  authors write, "The fact that Heather's colleague  

was approached by a faceless HR department  illustrates this disindividualized, panoptic power  

at work in her office environment." But corporate  fetish glosses over actual dress codes. Much of  

what we see in these fashion campaigns would  actually be wildly inappropriate for the office,  

if 90s standards are to be abided by. So maybe  all of this is subversion at the end of the day,  

it's reinterpreting codes we're all familiar  with to create new meaning. For some, putting  

on an oversized business suit could give them the  feeling of control that a Wall Street executive  

had, made even more subversive if the person  wearing it is someone who in actuality, faces more  

glass ceilings than the straight, White man. For  others, dressing in edgy business clothes, while  

hating your job, could be ironic. For whatever  the reason, corporate aesthetics have become  

aspirational in 2024. And it might be because of  how non-existent corporate culture has become,  

at least in comparison to what it was. It's even  more interesting, given all the think pieces about  

how Gen Z is the most anti-work generation to  date. The reason we're seeing this anti-work,  

or less work agenda, is partially due to  the COVID-19 pandemic, which activated as,  

Angela Yang writes, "A radical shift in priorities  as people around the world, especially those who  

had the means to isolate at home, discovered new  passions and a slower pace of life. Corporate jobs  

pivoting to remote work showed for the first time,  and on a massive scale, that flexibility in work  

was possible without compromising productivity.  And now that employees have gotten a taste,  

they're refusing return to old ways." The term  "fake email job" has spawned on TikTok recently  

to describe the kind of aspirational jobs that  are usually remote, require few hard skills,  

have little managerial oversight, and with little  time commitment. And even though Gen Z gets a  

bad rep for their supposed not wanting to work, I  think it's not bad to want work-life balance, and  

to not wanna have your work be your entire life.  And to also be able to have time to do things that  

you wanna do and to not wanna sit in traffic for  three hours commuting. I think it's less about  

not wanting to work, and more about wanting to not  have work be your entire life. But regardless of  

how much you're actually working at your remote  job, one thing most people can agree on, is that  

remote work has killed the workplace culture.  The Wall Street Journal interviewed Priya Parker,  

author of "The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and  Why It Matters." Parker explains, "On Zoom, when  

everything is muted, the signals that you get as  to whether or not a group is with you are deleted.  

It becomes a sterile environment. You can't hear  people's sighs, groans or laughs. It destroys one  

of the core elements of group conversation, which  is a feedback loop: call and response." That's not  

to say that remote work is all bad. It makes  some jobs more accessible for disabled folks,  

can be beneficial for parents who have young  kids who can't afford childcare. And some jobs,  

like these fake email jobs, really don't  require someone to sit in an office for  

eight hours a day. But all this is to say is that  corporate culture has become sort of obsolete for  

many people. Michelle Santiago Cortes observed  for Dirt media. "Shards of corporate culture's  

remains are now floating around social media as  memes or congealing into dystopian novels like  

'Severance,' or 'The Other Black Girl.' 'Finance  bros' and 'tech bros' are still easy shorthand,  

but nobody quite knows where they work  anymore." I also noticed that most of the  

corporate fetishizers are people who have never  worked a real, cubicle office job to begin with.  

And so it's unsurprising that the 2024 fashion  version of the 90s office is a better, unrealistic  

version of what it was. Emily Sundberg explains  the difference. "The corporate fetish office  

provides structure, routine and friends. Nobody is  discussing the dreadful commute, or awful hours,  

or the looming horror of AI replacing a team.  Everyone answers the phone and nobody is texting  

at their desk. It's the best version of the office  we imagine, and the one that we're not going to  

get anything close to as people get forced back  in." There's also a sure crossover between this  

aestheticization and the old corporate fashion  magazine industry, as exemplified by "The Devil  

Wears Prada." I think a lot of young people, me  included, had the dream of working at a fashion  

magazine in like a Andy Sachs, Jenna Rink, Carrie  Bradshaw kinda way. While these women didn't dress  

for the office in accordance with the corporate  handbook, they did have seemingly high-earning,  

glamorous positions, in the corporate world with  opportunities to move up the ladder. They also  

didn't have iPhones. But as magazines become less  powerful, and journalists become less respected,  

the dream has burst for many people. But  ultimately I think one of the biggest drivers of  

this trend is the desire for work-life separation.  There's the idea that a place of work also means  

a place where that work is contained. The minute  you step out of the office door, you're no longer  

on call, no longer expected to answer emails, and  no longer thinking about work until you head to  

the office the following morning. Obviously this  is an oversimplification of what work life was  

actually like, but compared to now, when many  of us are overstimulated by email and Slack,  

pinging at all hours of the day, and the  overall exhaustion of tech screen exposure,  

yes, the 90s office life could appear like a  dream. Of course there's also non-office fantasy  

reasons that make corporate core more enticing  for the fashion industry at large. For one,  

the quiet luxury movement last year was a small  bag movement. It also coincided with "Succession,"  

a show which denigrated the ludicrously  capacious bag as being a symbol of too poorism.

- What's even in there? Huh? Flat  shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail?

- Also in general, small bags have just been  having a moment for years now because of the  

recycled Y2K small bag trend. So it makes sense  that large bags would become trendy again because  

trend cycles, they cycle. Even quiet luxury brand,  The Row, released their own capacious Birkin-esque  

bag, the Margaux. I also came across this  newsletter, Cartoons Hate Her, which talked about  

the revival of "The Boobs" era, which I don't even  know if I'm allowed to use these terms because of  

YouTube policy, so I'm going to refer to them as  "the cleavage and the butt" era. I think I can  

say butt. The writer makes the case that we were  previously in a butt era for 15 years. She writes,  

"It was new and exciting to see Kim Kardashian in  2009 when we were on the tail of the 2000s, which  

was a Skinny Era and Cleavage Era. Women were no  longer afraid to get bulky in the gym. In fact,  

we intended on it, as long as it was confined to  our glutes. Everyone wanted a big butt, including  

girls who were terrified of having a big butt just  five years earlier." And 2010s fashion trends like  

athleisure and high waisted jeans correlated with  the butt era. But ultimately, pendulums swing,  

and that applies to body types too, which is why  everyone was freaking out when Kim Kardashian  

allegedly reversed her BBL. Furthermore,  the author suggests that the office siren,  

with its button-down blouse is a sign of the  Cleavage Era transition. In my personal 2024 "Ins  

and Outs" list, I put menswear as an in and bows  as an out. And I think the corporate core trend  

is complementary to my prediction, not to brag. We  just had a period of girl everything. Girl dinner,  

girl math, girl blah, blah, blah. My girl  culture soundbite from YouTube even became  

a trend on TikTok, which was weird. And so  naturally it makes sense that people would  

grow tired of this and hop onto the opposite,  which is adulthood. And I don't know about you,  

but I feel like the stereotype of adulthood,  to me, is a business suit and high heels,  

the image of our parents when growing  up in the 80s, 90s and/or 2000s.

- Just trying to locate my  cubicle. I can't find it anywhere.

- For anyone who's actually worked in  one of these 90s time-capsule offices,  

fashion's corporate fetish might sound like a  joke. People of my parents' generation remember  

a time when office culture was a normal thing  to complain about, not aspire to. In 1992,  

Robert Downey Jr. visited Wall Street for  a documentary and said this to the camera.

- If money is evil, then that building is hell.  This is the most obnoxious group of money hungry,  

low IQ, high energy jackrabbit, wannabe  big time, small-time talking, bothersome,  

irritating, I have ever had to  endure for more than five minutes.

- [Mina] When Christian Bale visited Wall Street  to prepare for his role as Patrick Bateman,  

he told GQ, "I got there and a bunch of the  guys on the trading floor, they were going,  

'Oh yeah, we love Patrick Bateman.'  And I was like, 'Yeah, ironically,  

right?' And they were like, 'What do you mean?'"  Throughout the 80s and 90s, plenty of movies,  

books and shows highlighted the problems  with corporate executive greed. And in 1999,  

Hollywood even focused on the monotony of  office life that stifled the everyday worker.

- Sounds like somebody's  got a case of the Mondays!

- There's a really great "Now You See It" video  essay on this. The guy calls these movies,  

"Cubicle movies." I'll play a clip from his video.

- [Narrator] "Being John Malkovich,"  and to an extent, all cubicle movies,  

seem to reflect this idea in some way.  Social forces compel us to conform ourselves  

into a certain definition of success, like  having the good job and a comfortable life.  

But having to do this requires the belief  that who we already are isn't good enough.

- But I think the disconnect here for Zoomers and  young millennials, other than the fact that we  

never actually experienced 90s office life, is the  fact that Silicon Valley's coolification agenda in  

the 2010s feels almost worse. What I mean by  coolification is, for the last 10-plus years,  

we've seen these large tech companies build  out their offices to create not just a working  

environment, but a home, a lifestyle. A New  York Times reporter took a look at a Google  

office in 2013 and noted the "labyrinth of play  areas, cafes, coffee bars and open kitchens,  

sunny outdoor terraces with chaises, gourmet  cafeterias that serve free breakfast, lunch  

and dinner. Broadway-themed conference rooms with  velvet drapes, and conversation areas designed to  

look like vintage subway cars." The office perks,  while nice, were designed to keep people in the  

office for longer, maximizing productivity while  building company loyalty. Once revolutionary, now  

it's cheugy. It doesn't help that more and more  founders and executives are caught in the middle  

of company scandals, getting arrested for fraud,  facing lawsuits, tweeting just insane takes,  

and ultimately shattering the illusion of a  prestigious working environment. Last year,  

Reuters published an in-depth report  on Axon, the company that makes tasers,  

and its fraternity-style hazings that involved,  you guessed it, tasing their own employees. And  

just in the face of mass layoffs over the past  year or so, it's also clear that company loyalty  

is not that prized, after all. After FTX filed  for bankruptcy in November, Brian Chesky, the  

Chief Executive of Airbnb tweeted, "It feels like  we were in a nightclub and the lights just turned  

on." The desire to dissociate from your boss has  never been more necessary. And people are all but  

trying to separate the corporate body from its  demonic head. In contrast, the retro 80s and 90s  

corporate lifestyle appears brandless. There are  no logos and no Elon Musks. You have no idea what  

company any character in "Fight Club" or "Office  Space" works for because the identical monotony  

signifies only work. The idea of work, and nothing  more. But of course, the idea of work itself is  

political. After all, the 1980s catapulted  a new era of capitalism. Management got more  

powerful and declining union membership gradually  reduced the influence of big labor. Corporations  

accelerated this trend by closing factories  where unions were strong, shifting production  

to Sunbelt states that had long anti-union  traditions, and attacking government antitrust  

and regulatory policies. Ronald Reagan, who  was president from 1981 to 1989, famously said,

- Government is not the solution to  our problem. Government is the problem.

- Not to mention that it was the white collar,  straight White man who benefited the most.  

People of color, women, working class, and queer  people all faced brutal inequalities, workplace  

harassment and barriers to success. And as  Annette Lynch and Katalin Medvedev put it simply,  

"Suits never do their own dirty work. They are not  that kind of 'work clothes.' The suits are not on  

the front lines in Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Class-based power has its privileges. And one of  

them is not to soil your clothes." But in 1990,  not even the white collar White man was fully  

spared. America entered a recession, and within  two years, 1.1 million office workers had been  

laid off, many of them from the middle management  tier. Nikil Saval, who wrote "Cubed: A Secret  

History of the Workplace," told Vox, "During this  time, layoffs became common, and there was a rapid  

increase in mergers, and you had workers emerging  from them and being thrown into cubicles. So the  

cubicle became the symbol of the transforming  workplace, of impermanence and the disposability  

of workers." Because of the economic context,  and also because cubicles were actually getting  

smaller, complaints against cubicles ballooned  in the 90s. Some people compared them to prisons.

- Hopefully it won't be too much like prison.

- Ironically, in Texas, a prison system responded  to overcrowding by redesigning their jails along  

the lines of an open-plan office with cubicle  partitions. But like most aesthetics of today,  

corporate fetish is vibes forward. I think it  says a lot that in all these corporate movies, we  

rarely see what it is the employees are actually  working on. Even in shows like "Mad Men," that's  

literally about work, where most of the show  takes place in an office, there's an air of work,  

but the everyday drudgery is off-screen.  The more exciting bits, the socializing,  

the drinking, the dinners with clients, the flashy  presentations, that's what we're shown. And it  

makes sense because these movies and shows were  coming at a time when people were still mostly in  

the office. And so this media was an escape from  that office life. No one wants to come back home  

from work to see more work. And also would just be  bad storytelling. Like the idea of having a show  

where people just send emails and copy papers,  who wants to watch that? But I think this is  

why most corporate fetishizers are people who have  never experienced the reality of it. If they did,  

they'd probably be more obsessed with a different  experience. Maybe next on the slate, for instance,  

will be a retirement core. Anyways, this is the  end of the video. Thank you all for watching.  

My name is Mina, and I hope you have a lovely  rest of your day. And take the day off. Bye.

- Congratulations.

- Thanks.