Women’s corporate wear in Australia is a complicated thing, and what brand you choose reveals a little too much about you.
Finding the corporate wear is a challenging task. You want to look like a girl boss and not like the principal from Matilda.
You want your blazer to look chic and oversized, not baggy and poorly fitted.
You want to look effortless, but you also want to look like you’ve made an effort, and under no circumstances do you want to end up looking like a real estate agent.
Unless, you are a real estate agent, but even then, you probably don’t want to end up looking like a stereotypical real estate agent.
A popular Instagram account, The Aussie Corporate, has done a public service and compiled a list of the most popular brands for Aussie women that need corporate wear.
For Millennial women, the top brands are: Scanlan Theodore, Camilla and Marc, Saba, Cue and Portmans.
Gen Z women are into: Kookai, Zara, Forecast, The Iconic, and Uniqlo.
Corporate wear has also become such a “thing” in Australia that the brand you wear says so much about you – and I make no apologies for delivering the truth.
Please proceed with caution and a sense of humour.
Scanlan Theodore
There’s no tactful way to say this: You are from money. You went to private school, you’ve been on a skiing holiday and you’ve only ever filed your tax through a family accountant, none of that Etax stuff.
You like to say you value “fabrics” to make excuses for how much you spend on your work wardrobe, and you’ve always dressed in designer, even when you were making $55k a year as a borderline intern.
Your fashion influences are Lara Bingle, and Bec Judd, and if you are from Sydney, you love the bread at Totti’s.
Camilla and Marc
You haven’t met a blazer that you don’t love and respect. When the phrase “girl boss” became part of our culture, you used it without a hint of irony.
Now, you use it ironically and you are absolutely thriving.
You are a woman on a mission and are known as the one that gets stuff done in the office.
You are addicted to your Frank Green water bottle, you love pilates, frozen yoghurt and your partner will propose when you are in Europe this Aussie winter.
When you were single you googled the medium salary estimate of the guy’s job title you matched with on Tinder.
You love to bang on about quality over quantity when it comes to fashion and swear you’d rather buy one $600 blazer than countless flimsy ones from chain stores. You just pray no one notices you own seven Camilla and Marc blazers.
Kookai
You are someone who constantly has a gender reveal, a hens party or bridesmaid duties on your social roster. Your style is heavily influenced by early 2000s beach-based reality shows like The Hills, even though you’d deny it until you were blue in the face.
You are the girl who organises office drinks and is very invested in the Christmas party theme. Sometimes people at work underestimate you but it only serves to make them look stupid. You can dress like an influencer and still be very capable.
You’ve tried to make strapless outfits work countless times at work, talk about bloating far too often and, when balayage hair went out of fashion, you mourned it.
You’d say your style icon is Lara Bingle but it is actually Tammy Hembrow.
Uniqlo
You are practical!
You remember everyone’s birthdays, you excel at hitting deadlines and you know a good basic when you see one.
You love the colour black, you want stuff you can easily throw in the wash and you make jokes that you can’t find time to iron.
You are the person who won’t let meetings drag on and you are a master of any software you’ve ever had to use.
You promote WFH because when you stay home you manage to get your 10,000 steps in before lunch.
The Iconic
You are a fast fashion girly who is heavily influenced by whatever is going viral on TikTok. You’ll try any work fashion if it just means you get that dopamine hit of same-day delivery.
You are the office sunshine, you like getting creative, you absolutely like to use buzz words like “quiet quitting” and you are a big fan of a midweek pub session with your mates after you’ve knocked off.
You’ll try anything and you bring the innovative vibes to work.