There are many ways to celebrate being good at your job. A promotion, perhaps. A bonus. A little certificate on the wall declaring you Employee of the Month. tjeerd marie had other ideas. For Employee of the Month!, designers Isa van Moorselaar and David Grimmius turned the office into a stage for exhaustion, workplace pressure and the increasingly strange things we do to convince everyone, including ourselves, that we are doing just fine.
Appropriately held in a tall, brand-new office building, everything looked reassuringly office-like: harsh LED lights, a water cooler, fake plants and shoulder bags hanging dutifully from a coat rack. The phones kept ringing. Fingers kept ticking away at keyboards. Unsettling cracking sounds – the sort of cracks that could belong to a computer, a speaker or perhaps the skull of an overworked office worker – echoed through the room.
The collection picked up where the sounds left off. A dark blue pinstripe suit came with dropped shoulders and a pronounced hunchback, suggesting the sluggish weight of exhaustion. Another model dragged a paper shredder behind her, the bottom of her black dress completely shredded as though she had got caught in the machinery of office life and, naturally, had no time to deal with it.
An oversized ochre leather trench concealed a massive red foam skirt, bulging dramatically around the hips. A red felt cape mimicked the strokes of ties dangling from the shoulders, its front cut away to reveal nothing underneath, as if even getting dressed properly had become another deadline to miss. Elsewhere, ties were pressed into jacket pockets and sewn directly into the garments, turning the office uniform into something impossible to take off. A bubble skirt carried a train made entirely from pastel Post-it notes. Because if there is one thing every overworked employee needs, it is a longer list of things to do.
The tailoring remained remarkably polished amid all this disorder. A linen suit paired long shorts with a perfectly constructed peplum jacket, its small gathered pockets secured with bows and its collar popped up halfway. It had something of a femme fatale quality, if the femme fatale in question had three unanswered emails and a meeting at 14:00. Suitcases were carried through the space, plastered with papers and work files, including one marked “Payment Due” and another featuring a nearly completed crossword puzzle. Even leisure appeared to have become work-adjacent admin.
A model stared into nothingness with the particular disbelief of someone who has just remembered they have another meeting after this one. The sound dropped away. Conversation started. Every response to her boss was followed by the thought she was actually having: “I want to sleep more.” “I don’t want those things.” When she tried to explain that she was exhausted, her boss asked whether she was pregnant.
“We really appreciate your work…”
By now, the clothes were beginning to look as tired as their wearers. One dress had been taken off halfway, dangling around the waist as its wearer trudged onwards. As the sound became increasingly distorted and fast-paced, the silhouettes became increasingly warped. Then came the ultimate office casualty: a woman in a long suit jacket peppered with burn holes, her hair looking completely fried. When she finally stopped, the speakers cracked and her boss asked if she was fine.
She smiled a frantic, almost manic smile and said she was. Her boss, apparently equipped with at least some basic observational skills, could see that she was not, and offered the usual corporate remedies: the relaxation room, some chocolate, perhaps even a spa day. Still smiling, she explained that it was in her contract to smile at all times.
“I see you on Monday.”
With that, tjeerd marie’s office fantasy landed somewhere between fashion show, workplace satire and a particularly unhinged HR training video. Employee of the Month! took the familiar codes of professionalism: the suit, the tie, the smile, the productivity, the endless willingness to go above and beyond, and stretched them until they started to crack.
For tjeerd marie, the grey area between womenswear and menswear becomes a fitting metaphor for the world of work itself: somewhere between personal and professional, control and collapse, appearance and reality. If Employee of the Month! proves anything, it is that there is apparently no workplace problem that cannot be solved with a smile, some chocolate and a compulsory trip to the relaxation room. tjeerd marie simply took the logic of office life to its natural conclusion: when the employee is falling apart, make the outfit bigger, the smile wider and the workload longer.
After all, someone has to win Employee of the Month.
Images by Olivia Witmond
