Is the boxy oversized blazer era behind us?

The fantasy of limitless productivity is losing its grip on young women.

Across social media, a growing number are rejecting grind culture and questioning what success is supposed to look like. Rather than buying oversized Zara blazers and monetizing hobbies into seven-day side hustles, many are urging one another to pursue “real” hobbies for pleasure and to invest in meaningful community instead. Hustle influencers and coaches still populate the feed. However, the growing seed of disillusionment with grind culture among Gen-Z and millennial women is undeniably a feature of many of our FYPs. 

Of course, grind culture’s influence on women (of all ages) cannot be evaluated without considering the highs and lows of the girlboss era. The term was first coined by founder of Nasty Gal, Sophia Amoruso in her 2014 autobiography #Girlboss. Amoruso’s book details her illustrious journey of building her multi-million-dollar clothing retail business from the ground up. The term sparked a global movement. Whilst her story serves as an inspirational to many, scholar Aislynn Martin notes how “the culture around this movement revealed something toxic… women were given their own word [girlboss]…”. A term concealing what Martin calls “hard, sexist undertones and keeps women separate.” as “after all, no one ever has to say, #Boyboss”. Both contemporary neoliberalism theories and entrepreneurship narratives hinge on personal agency within free markets to “realise individual potential, enhance status and attain material rewards”. Post-feminism, which many regard as ‘choice feminism’ also plays a heavy hand in this rhetoric. As a discourse, post-feminism stresses less on the impact of complex systems of power and instead concentrates on individual empowerment, self-care and personal choice as a means to reap rewards, achievements and self-actualization. 

Studies like those of Byrne et al, Heizmann and Liu, and Nadin et al, show how the representations of women entrepreneurs in the media are embedded with post-feminist and neoliberal language. Nadin et al, specifically looked at the post-recession media representations in a daily popular UK broadsheet, ‘The Times’ from 2006-2018. Their analysis of this publication’s articles found copious references to the “natural traits” men and women. As well as discourse around which were “suitable or unsuitable for entrepreneurship”. Unsuitable traits were treated as aspects of womanhood that could be conquered by working on the self. While suitable traits “had to be exploited to help them and other women succeed”. Nadine et al found that this intense balancing act was celebrated as a display of the “idealised and appropriate entrepreneurial femininities that allow women to have it all”.  

Scholar, Maria Adamson, finds similar results in her analysis of the autobiographies of four celebrity women CEOs: Karren Brady, former vice chairman of West Ham football club and star of the UK's The Apprentice; Hilary Devey, CEO of Pall-Ex logistics and star of Dragon's Den; Sheryl Sandberg, CFO of Facebook; and Ariana Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post. Adamson argues that “celebrity CEO autobiography texts call on women to embrace but carefully balance various aspects of femininity, including behaviour, attitudes and roles, and that a successful balance is one done in a calculated, market-oriented and efficient way which, first and foremost, benefits business goals”.

However, HBO’s Industry, does make a case that not every young person is putting down the blazer (this time, it concerns extremely well-tailored expensive ones). The show follows a group of young finance graduates who do their best to stay afloat in the cut-throat world of investment banking. Mickey Down, one half of the duo behind the show, in an interview with The Atlantic argued your average Gen Zer is “a mini Margaret Thatcher” and “I don’t even think they consider it, like, ‘capitalism.’ It’s just ‘securing the bag’”. Nonetheless, what seems to be a consensus among many of the recent work-based Film & TV like Bugonia, WeCrashed, Super Pumped, The Drop Out as well as Industry is that even if you’re a willing participant of corporate grind culture, high-stress work environments don’t yield the best results for your mental and physical wellbeing. Sometimes you end up kidnapped. If you’re Emma Stone playing the millennial CEO of a major pharmaceutical company.  

Largely pivoting from the world of finance, pharma and tech, the creative industry is also impacted by the phenomenon of grind culture. Milan-based Professor of the Sociology of Culture, Alessandro Gandini notes that in the creative industry, the systems of individualization and entrepreneurialization ‘get together’ in ‘the essentially project-based nature of creative labour, and result in a diffusion of freelancing and self-employment as these become the most – sometimes the only – suitable options for establishing a creative career.’ Gandini reflects that consequently the structure of the creative industry, results in an ‘emergence of a large individualized and entrepreneurialized workforce grown up in the myth of self-organization, being highly flexible and strongly motivated to undertake also low-paid or unpaid jobs.’ Additionally, self-branding has become a norm of the modern digital landscape and arguably its pervasiveness is mostly evidenced by creative freelancers who often feel a pressure to constantly invest (financially and mentally) in their social profile in the hopes of scoring paid work.  

Due to the nature of varying contract types, freelance work and the difference in how creative and culture industries are defined across the world, it is difficult to accurately state the number of women working in the creative industries. However, scholars Carr and Raalte, note ‘women make up a substantial proportion of the workforce in many areas of the creative industries’. Gender disparities exist essentially across all industries; but, the specific working conditions of the fashion industry make grind culture even more polarizing for young women throughout their career. The Devil Wears Prada (2006), famous Miranda Priestly line “everyone wants to be us” plays into the paradoxical nature of the creative industry that keeps it exploitative. You are expected to know just how lucky you are to be there and this is one of the ways the industry “obscures its inherent instability and vulnerability”. Women creative workers suffer most of the brunt of this rhetoric, often expected to be more accommodating of unpredictable, toxic and unstable working environments to maintain their supposed privileged position unlike their male counterparts. 

Popular podcaster and online digital creator, Kimberly Bizu last year in a viral video of hers, analyzed the discourse around “subscribing” in or out of hustle culture and related public perceptions. Bizu did not begrudge either prerogative. She ultimately lands on “there’s not just one version of a being a successful woman”. That’s simply it. Late-stage capitalism and patriarchy have put all of us through the ringer but overall, young women are taking a closer look into what works. This in itself shows a deeper meditation of how one best defines success and fulfilment for themselves.