Somewhere in the last two years, the herringbone blazer stopped being a symbol of arrival and started being a punchline. Not because it looks bad. Because everyone in it seems to know something the rest of us are still figuring out: the corner office was never the point.
Fashion has a habit of resurrecting whatever decade it can’t stop thinking about, and right now that decade is the 90s, specifically the version of the 90s where fluorescent lights hummed over cubicle farms and a fax machine counted as innovation. The twist this time is that nobody buying the look wants the job that came with it. They want the costume, and they want it to wink.
Corporate Drag as a Coping Mechanism
Call it corporate drag. It is executive tailoring stripped of its authority and handed back to people who have never set foot in a boardroom, worn ironically enough that the joke is obvious to anyone who has sat through a Tuesday status meeting that could have been an email. The appeal is not aspirational. It is exhausted. Millions of people spent the last several years being told that hybrid work would fix everything, and then watched their calendars fill up anyway.
Working Girls has built a label around exactly that fatigue. Founded in 2015 as what the team calls a creative art experiment, the Wisconsin based brand produces limited runs of apparel and objects that read the 90s office and the 90s teen bedroom as the same cultural artifact, worth the same amount of respect and the same amount of ridicule. A blazer sits next to a keychain shaped like a Saturday morning cartoon. Neither one is trying to be taken seriously, and that is the entire point.
Satire Sells Better Than Sincerity Right Now
Working Girls calls its office themed line The Corporate Void, and the name does most of the work. A phone case reading FAKING IT. A mesh set called NOT YOUR INTERN. A tote that says NOT FOR CORPORATE USE in the same font a memo would use to say the opposite. None of it asks the wearer to believe in the hustle. It asks them to laugh at having survived it.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Plenty of brands have tried to sell workwear nostalgia by playing it straight, betting that people miss the structure of office life enough to pay for a costume of it. Those bets mostly land flat, because nobody actually misses the meetings. What people respond to is permission to say the meetings were absurd the whole time, and to wear that opinion on a blazer.
Why the Joke Works on Gen Z and Burned-Out Millennials Alike
The audience here spans two generations that rarely agree on fashion. Millennials remember the actual 90s office, the landlines and the dress codes, and they buy in for the memory. Gen Z never lived it and buys in anyway, because the aesthetic maps cleanly onto a workplace they inherited secondhand: same burnout, same open floor plan, same unspoken expectation to look busy. The Corporate Void collection sits at that overlap on purpose, pulling from 90s cinema and cubicle culture at once so the reference lands whether or not you were there for the original.
It helps that the pieces are genuinely well made rather than costume grade. A heavyweight fleece hoodie or a herringbone blazer has to survive being worn seriously half the time and ironically the other half, and cheap construction gives that game away fast. Independent labels doing small batch runs can afford to care about that kind of durability in a way mass retailers chasing a trend cycle usually cannot.
The Trend Has a Shelf Life. The Instinct Behind It Does Not
Trends built on irony eventually curdle into cliche, and corporate drag will get there too. Some other decade’s office aesthetic will take its turn as the year’s punchline. But the instinct driving it, the refusal to pretend the 9 to 5 deserves reverence it never earned, is not going anywhere. People will keep dressing for the jobs they have while quietly telling the truth about how they feel about them. The blazer will look different next time. The joke stays the same.
