Why This 1950s Silhouette Is the Secret Weapon Women Are Using to Dominate the Workplace—And You Need to Know Now!
Nowhere is that better evidenced than last year’s explosive “corpcore” microtrend that fetishized corporate tropes with its cropped blazers, exaggerated pencil skirts, and severe heels. Brands like Aritzia and Zara, even Shein, then capitalized on the trend, marketing it to Gen Z as it entered the office for the first time, hoping to dress the part. Ironically, this look subsequently became more of a going-out ensemble than a going-to-the-office uniform; it wasn’t functional enough.
The Tobie’s softer details stand in opposition to this tropey rigidity and, at first glance, might align more with another sweeping trend du jour: the tradwife aesthetic. Its shape does allude, in a more general sense, to one favored by housewives of the ’50s, an irony that’s all too poignant at the moment. (Tradwife is short for “traditional wife” and encompasses a movement of women embracing more traditional domestic gender roles characteristic of the 1950s.) “Right now in America, we have a very strong, regressive political message coming from Washington,” says Dickinson. “It’s happening in our laws. It’s happening in very explicit remarks made by men in power that women should go back to being housewives,” says Dickinson, admitting, “If you saw this dress on a tradwife making a soufflé, you wouldn’t blink an eye.” But it would be unfair to leave the conversation there.
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“The shirt or house dress is a very complicated silhouette because it signals a woman’s role in the world as being a homemaker more than anything else,” Dickinson admits. That sort of ’50s silhouette has come back into fashion, whether it’s the Old Hollywood look proliferating on the red carpet or Jonathan Anderson dressing Sabrina Carpenter in Christian Dior’s famous New Look, which originally debuted in 1947. But McCardell’s version and Anthropologie’s subsequent riff on her time-tested concoction of function, comfort, and style alludes more to the work of modern womenswear designers like Tory Burch, who dedicated an entire collection to McCardell in 2022 with this silhouette featuring heavily, than a literal 1950s house dress.
As a case study of a more contemporary customer, Wu says, “I love that the Tobie strikes a balance between femininity and structure. Compared to the sharp tailoring of ‘corpcore’ or the office-siren look, the Tobie feels softer and more approachable—without losing that polished, professional feel. On the other hand, it’s more refined and waist-defining than the looser, romantic shapes of the tradwife aesthetic. I like that it makes me feel put-together without trying too hard.”
This simple, flattering Anthropologie dress sits at the middle of this minefield of a Venn diagram of regression, femininity, and freedom, but it seems to occupy its space with confidence. Zoom out and the Tobie silhouette is “this interesting mix of femininity meets office casual, which is unfortunately so revealing when it comes to women’s desires for workwear today,” says Dickinson. In the end, most of us are still just looking for comfort, style, and pockets—and that much has changed very little in the past century.
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