It’s the summer of return-to-office: The trains are once again packed and sweaty, the finance bros are hitting Cava on their lunch breaks, and “summer Fridays” are a thing of the distant past. The only problem is, no one knows what to wear. One need only to turn to TikTok to see the pandemonium playing out at a mass scale: twenty-something influencers recommending mini skirts and crop tops for the first day of a big internship, millennials rolling their eyes in the comments, and the whole thing being screenshotted and re-hashed on Twitter just for good measure.
As everyone begrudgingly resumes their daily commutes, these “What to Wear to Work” videos have become a battleground for what our new, post-pandemic normal will look like—and whether what we wear to the office should matter at all. A video posted this spring by creator Danielle Pheloung, a 27-year-old associate at Goldman Sachs, is a prime example. Titled “What to wear to the office this summer,” the video starts out innocently enough, with Pheloung suggesting high-necked tank tops and long skirts.
Then she moves on to sleeveless minidresses and cleavage-bearing “matching sets,” which is where things went off the rails. “I’m crying this is so Awesome,” wrote Twitter user @soychotic, who shared four screenshots from the video to her nearly 34,000 followers late last month. “This is your husband’s work wife/product mommy btw and he tells her he loves her outfit every morning and she does a .