Visual inspiration ranges from Gisele Bundchen’s classically sleek character in The Devil Wears Prada or Lucy Liu’s leather suit in Charlie's Angels to the less expected muses of “Supernanny” Jo Frost and the brown M&M. They share a fondness for fitted blazers, button-downs, and pencil skirts, sharp heels, and aughts-era square-framed glasses. It’s corporate chic, with an emphasis on the chic. But it’s deeper than just clothes: the trend showcases Gen Z’s romanticization of an office culture that they feel entirely alienated from.
Office work is still a reality for millions of people, but for an online generation, it’s largely understood through impressions and images. The pandemic lowered our standards of formality. It’s now completely normal to work from home in your sweatpants, or even no pants at all—if the memes are to be believed. As a culture, the grip of “office wear” is loosening fast. Fewer and fewer jobs require formal requirements, and we’re prioritizing comfort. But many trends are built on nostalgia, excavating something from a bygone era and testing its enduring relevance.
Perhaps the office siren trend sprouted from yearning for a time when going to work was an occasion, an opportunity to put an outfit together, go somewhere, and meet people… not just something you do on your laptop while Is It Cake? plays in the background. Of course, the trend isn't trying to literally re-manifest office work. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Zoomer advocating for returning to the office. Yet, the desire to cosplay it proves strong.
A microtrend within the microtrend gives even deeper insight. Under the #officesiren umbrella, a handful of creators shared videos like this one, where a woman in office wear pretends to work on her laptop while standing in a body of water, waves lapping over her Macbook Pro. It’s a send-up of work-from-home culture, where you could theoretically take a call from the middle of the ocean because you didn’t tell your employer you were taking a trip to Greece. It dramatizes the notion of work-life balance, collapsing the world of the corporate into the world of the personal. The incongruity of office garb and beach setting makes a joke out of it all, and Gen Z loves nothing more than to make everything a joke.
These videos, of course, also play on the word “siren,” creatures in Greek mythology who lure sailors to their deaths with their tantalizing songs. Taken literally, the siren of the office wouldn’t be its hardest worker or its highest earner; she would be the one distracting you from the hard work. The trend is also, at least implicitly, about becoming an object of beauty in the public sphere, something that Gen Z knows plenty about online but is less accustomed to IRL.
With many of these looks, part of the fun is their improbability. Many examples of the trend are overly sexualized, with knee-high stockings and short skirts, which certainly wouldn’t fly by HR standards. When showing something off that clearly shows too much skin for the average workplace, creators are at once baiting engagement and showing how far out of touch they are from actual office culture. But it’s not a literal misunderstanding of office attire; it’s all fantasy—mythology, if you will. “Office sirens” have nothing to do with what people actually wear to work, and especially not what Gen Z wants out of an office environment. It’s an outlet for the imagination and allows us to question tradition and dream up our own version of workplace utopia. What if we lived in a world where it didn’t matter what you wore?
As Zoomers start to develop our own attitude toward work, the “office siren” aesthetic reveals just how far we are from convention. There’s plenty of discourse (read: complaints from older generations) about our approach to work in general. We’re maligned for expecting too much, working too little, and mandating that the world bend to our needs.
So it follows that when we try to approximate office workwear, we miss the point. We want the fun parts. The kitten heels without the cubicles. The pencil skirts without the sexual harassment. The power suit without the 9-5. The Gen Z work ideal is flexibility at all costs, even if that means pajamas one day and pantyhose the next. We’re making work work for us.