How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

a book by Sarah Jaffe
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Press Work Won't Love You Back

Fashion for the ‘Lean Out’ Era

on wild workwear, and what it says about how women feel about work these days, for Elle’s October issue.

Veronique Hyland interviewed me about the season’s take on wild workwear, and what it says about how women feel about work these days, for Elle‘s October issue. She writes:

It’s more likely that most of these pieces will never find their way into fluorescent-lit cubicles, if only because of their quality of high camp. “The suit has always been drag,” Jaffe says. It’s a classic garment, one that “changes to a degree that it doesn’t at the same time, and men are always safe in it. As long as they’re wearing a suit, it can be a really bad ill-fitting Donald Trump suit, but they’re still powerful, right?” she says. “Whereas there’s a lot more pressure on women in terms of what we’re supposed to wear. Because you have so many more options, there are so many more ways to be wrong.” So while people might not necessarily be taking to the water cooler in pinstriped minis and suit jackets-turned-tube tops anytime soon, the club is another story. If anything, these aren’t clothes for labor; they’re clothes about labor, our way of grappling with a world where stability and certainty have ebbed. “The romance of work is never perfect,” as Jaffe puts it. “It’s always got cracks in it, and there are so many ways that comes out in the culture.”

Read the whole thing at Elle

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