The ‘Working Girl’ has returned to New York City
This fall, as an awkward New York City tries to figure out who it wants to be and who still wants to be working here, I have noticed a new generation of young professional women roaming the streets of midtown and FiDi. And they are unabashedly, comfortably, sporting sneakers to and fro the office. I’m not talking Prada or graffiti’ed Balenciaga — they are wearing straight up sport socks and old school running shoes with skirt suits and workdresses, and I am here for it.
In 1988, Melanie Griffiths’ Tess McGill inspired a generation of young professionals with her grit and determination that if you put in the hours, stayed true to yourself and fought for what’s right, you would beat the soul-sucking boss at that 9–5 job and get yours. Or at least, you would have some morals to fall back on. Tess, like most women pounding the pavement in New York back in the 80’s, had giant frizzy hair, shoulder pads, and wore those sneakers with pantyhose like a uniform. Why? Well she and thousands of other women were hustling on foot to ferries, the subway or the train only to make a run for it from Penn and Grand Central stations to be butts in seats across the city to clock in at 8:00am. They weren’t stupid — you had to be comfortable.
Fast forward to the late 90’s and early 2000’s, and Sarah Jessica Parker and the ladies of SATC showed us a whole new way to live and work in New York. You wore fancy flats and carried your heels with you, or you wore the heels and took a cab — everywhere. Carrie would rather have died than be caught dead in sneakers, and I’m almost certain Charlotte never rode the subway. The fashion sense these actors portrayed was not only entertainment, but in many ways they were either a mirror for my life or a life I emulated. If this was New York, I was going to live it! Like it or not, they set the tone and the stage for how we dressed in the 90’s and 2000’s in the office, on dates and out at the Hamptons. I wore running shoes to my job in Chicago from 1995–2000, but when I got to NYC in 2001, I learned how to make flats and band-aids work for me, and knew how to duck into an alcove or storefront like Superman to switch to heels before anyone noticed.
It occurred to me that Working Girl appeared in theaters 35 years ago, with the first Sex and the City episode just 10 years later. It’s highly unlikely that today’s 22-year-old can identify with those women or would even find them interesting let alone role models. I mean, not one of them had an iPhone when they aired for god’s sake! My guess is today’s 20-somethings would reference them as ‘shows my mom watched when she was working’. (OMG)
That said, minus the frizz and the shoulder pads, they LOOK like we did! Fresh-faced, excited about the future, struggling in an expensive city with high rents, trying to get into the hot restaurants and clubs, making ‘ends meet’ — in sneakers!
So while you will still never see me in running shoes on Park Ave (designer flats of course), I love that these gals have rolled into the city doing their thing, charting their commutes down streets and subways I once walked, figuring out how to navigate New York in their shoes.
As the new New York emerges from the shadow of a pandemic with a new generation of Tesses, Carries and Courtneys, I couldn’t help but wonder…who will they watch on Netflix?
