Office Siren
The lure of the office siren is enigmatic, imbuing new chic into secretarial positions at the heart of business. Whether it’s Gabbriette Bechtel, Bella Hadid, or Giselle Bündchen in The Devil Wears Prada, everyone seems to have their own frame of reference for the re-appropriation of 9-to-5 corporate attire currently inundating fashion with a plethora of razor-thin glasses, textured khaki tones, and pleated pencil skirts, entrenched in both pieces of the now and the past. However, somewhere along the epidemiological pipeline from girlhood to girlboss, professional vixen-core emerges as yet another aesthetic to raise the question: do gender-essentializing trends feed into empowered commentaries–or else stand to perpetuate dangerous narratives?
The iconic Bayonetta. Waking up from a lake without her memories, she soon strives to get them back through her supernatural, larger-than-life abilities. Courtesy of PlatinumGames, via NintendoLife. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
From posts by social media vets like @illumitati and Blizzy McGuire, interworking spectacles seamlessly down to their sleek frame–and directly into the feeds of the most terminally online users–what once seemed a micro-trend populating niche circles has tread the path most tend to wind when anchored in bits and data, gaining IRL salience. In other words, the office siren has broken her digital bubble, dispersed and unkempt, into realms of runway and celebrity, all springing from a locus somewhat resistant to re-traceability (though tempting it may prove to try). For the walls upholding online echo chambers are wireless, blurring the threshold between real and cyber, feeding forward as much as back, untethered by laws of tangibility. And, when it is esteemed figures in fashion's fovea who are propelling such trends, the initial thread can quickly become dislodged or otherwise misplaced–if there ever was just one reference on the moodboard to begin with, at the style’s imagined inception. Rather, chalk it up to a bleed in the collective think-tank, and high-brow proliferation and co-opting of aesthetics stimulate our deductive capacities, especially if it feels that the image of the white-collar femme is being paraded inauthentically for brand deals and billboards. So where, really, did she first emerge?
Well, while many believe the formally adorned muse to be an offshoot of the general Y2K renaissance (a term that may seed much dread to the ears and eyes; distaste and seething only intensified by its staggering overuse and association with Depop up-seller descriptions, employed erroneously to peddle thrift finds), pop culture consensus seems to attribute the image to one particular retro, fittingly pixelated, and yet polygonal form: the gun-toting, hack-and-slash, video-game dame Bayonetta herself (pictured above). Spearheading the AAA franchise, the game series to which she belongs plays out much like an assault on the senses throughout, its action an infernal cascade of button-spamming fare, with the protagonist Umbra Witch’s long locks employed as a weapon only to rival those of antagonist-turned-ally, Jeanne.
Contrasted via opposites of light and dark, the jet-set raven Bayonetta brings an unapologetically seductive and formidable charisma to a traditionally male-dominated space, albeit with a campy, no-nonsense attitude to supplement her staunch persona. It is similar to the cuntiness an office siren, should she actually be realized in the workplace, would impart, standing in stark subversion against the grain of conservatism that such occupational domains foster. Nowadays, this is lauded by the progressiveness of Gen Z, but, at the time–much like Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft before her–the sheer magnitude of Bayonetta’s power was one rarely imparted, in defiance of the undeniable women-as-fodder, damsels in distress, or romantic interest tropes that fueled male vengeance narratives (female suffering typically inflicted as the inciting incident for virile violence to unfold in games like Max Payne 2, Grand Theft Auto, and Red Dead Redemption). As an amnesic agent of her own destiny, with the bravado and high-fashion to match, it is no wonder then that Bayonetta may have been the one to invigorate many to seek abandon in spectral lenses–especially as, to a gothic-baroque backdrop, such gloomy low-res graphics epitomize nostalgia and never-ending cool (similarly, see the resurgence of early Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and American McGee’s Alice in counter-culture).
There is a layer of surrealism to seeing corporate looks take the catwalk at Miu Miu. Fittingly, via Office Magazine. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
However, the office siren remains something other than eyewear and demeanor; while these represent important component parts of the look, one may also be clad in formal workforce attire from head-to-toe and sport a muted color palette. The result beckons to mind grounded connotations of librarians, lawyers, and working professionals, more than the absurdism of simulated gaming environments.
Yet, in spite of such hyper-realism, the label is never applied to figures like, say, The Dare, or Fever Ray–individuals who too have donned power-suited attire to recent notoriety (the latter themselves, gender-nonconforming, doing so to play with notions of toxic masculinity). No, the office siren, by name, becomes inherently gendered within traditionalist, binary modes of thought, and, by proxy–embedded in systems that exalt the patriarchy–is rendered sexualized, into the category of temptress. It is not all too dissimilar from those very video-game femmes, such as Bayonetta, whose fierceness, while seen as odes to empowerment and sexually liberated, must still contend with the cheesecake pin-up that their avatars are characteristically beholden to. That is: objectified in unattainable, non-normative proportions at the behest of male creators, based upon the premise that sex sells, their dialogue too is relegated to tongue-in-cheek quips, bordering explicit. Context-situated, the conversation thus turns from female authority to sexuality, as the unbuttoned, form-fitting hallmarks of the office siren begin to speak more to subjugation and the male gaze.
I say this because some have levied it a replacement to the rise of girl-oriented media in 2023, anti-coquette if you will; rather than pedestalizing infantilizing aesthetics, the office siren is said to trade pink bows, Lolita, and Lana Del Rey for pinstripes and a salary. However, as Daisy Alioto (of Dirt Media) previously surmised in a discussion with Vogue, “Just because something comes chronologically after girlhood doesn't mean that that necessarily represents womanhood… Womanhood is more than the absence of girlhood…. [It leads to people asking] to be sexualized as women rather than to be sexualized as girls.”
Situated in a post-#MeToo world–one grappling with long-standing, warped power dynamics and a cultural call to declare “That’s enough”–it’s a tricky slope to navigate: fetishization can glamorize predatory behavior, while detractors in extremity may breed victim-blaming sentiments reminiscent of Fox News, or else harmful, misogynistic narratives of women having “F***ed [Their] Way Up To the Top” (to quote the Del Rey song at her character’s peak on sophomore album Ultraviolence, again showing how corp-core may not veer too far from coquette in romanticizing exploitative fantasies).
Yet, if those are the odds at play, satirizing, ironizing, and reclaiming the stereotype of the seductive secretary who staunchly wields her sexuality could prove cathartic, calling into question power hierarchies through public haute couture displays of late-stage resistance (therefore bringing visibility). The question is whether this is attainable, given the harsh reality. The answers are not absolute.
Eartheater, painted clown white in the video for Powders track, ‘Crushing’. Video directed by Andrew Thomas Huang (of FKA twigs’ ‘cellophane’, and Björk’s Utopia acclaim).
