If you’ve spent more than five minutes on TikTok over the past six months, you likely will have met her. She’s a woman in an office cubicle wearing slimline bayonettas, a button-down unfastened to the sternum, and enough grey to rival the London skyline. Knee-length wiggle skirts, boxy blazers and a slingback kitten heel also make appearances in her wardrobe, and Gisele’s cameo in The Devil Wear Prada is her patron saint. ‘Who is she?’ I hear you ask. She’s the office siren, of course. A close cousin of the frumpcore aesthetic that appeared last year, much has been made of her ascent to online virality. Does this signal a post-pandemic Return To The Office? Are we all just shills longing to lick the boot of capitalism? Will a woman’s work ever be done?

One woman who’s arguably been at the forefront of this trend is professional supermodel Bella Hadid. Fashion’s favourite It-girl is no stranger to a striped city worker’s shirt, and has been known to sport a pair of specs with a slick up-do and office-appropriate pumps. Recently, however, Hadid has switched her slimline bayonettas for a thicker rimmed pair of frames, ones you might’ve bought from the combination Topshop/Topman in 2008 and worn with the lenses popped out and a moustache pendant round your neck. Yes, you heard that right – Bella Hadid is bringing back geek chic. Though the change in weight of Hadid’s frames might seem like a minor aesthetic deviance, this is actually huge fashion news. Before you know it, she will’ve swapped her Gucci set for a Peter Pan collar and pleated plaid skirt.

Though they are bedfellows, late-aughts geek chic diverges from the office siren aesthetic in that its foundations lay in the codes of twee. Most TikTok smash cuts conflate the current corp-coded aesthetic with things like frumpcore and geek chic. Head to that app and you’ll find thousands of videos with millions of views that are labelled geek chic, when they are, in fact, office sirens. They both involve similar equipment, so they must be the same, right? On the contrary, geek chic reached peak popularity around the same time Zooey Deschanel was saying things like adorkable on terrestrial television, and high street shops were overflowing with cute little loafers and brogues. It was a time when men wore bow ties and braces, and didn’t care if their trousers floated high above their ankles, or if their Burton cardigans fit a little too tight. This was the true era of the geek.

While the current day siren has always been intent on communicating her allure, it’s always been straight-laced adorkability for the noughties geek. Though it may be her domain, the siren wants you to know she doesn’t play by the rules of the office, while the geek is a little bit more by-the-book. Just look at Hadid’s outfit. Full look Gucci, straight from the runway – exit number 13, SS24, to be exact. What’s more by the book than that?

And the differences go on, too. The siren is sexy, while the geek is plucky; the geek is goofy, while the siren is commanding; but most importantly, the office siren is cosplaying corporate aesthetics for online clout, while the geek is authentically uncool and revels in it. That’s not to say that Hadid looks uncool – she looks great, as she always does, and that’s what makes the look so effective. For Hadid, bayonettas are no longer subversive: they’ve been reclaimed by too many cool girls online. It’s no longer enough to cosplay as an office worker, you have to actually channel the true geek within. Because what’s cooler than looking like a geek when you’re actually a millionaire supermodel?

So, as the trend cycle continues its never ending revolutions, it’s really not that wild to suggest we could be creeping towards the return of geek chic. The office siren herself is intrinsically linked to an early 2000s aesthetic, as most of her references come from designers like Calvin Klein and Prada at the turn of the century. But if we look at the most recent runways, designers are beginning to shift away from that era and lean towards trends in much more recent memory. Brands like Miu Miu are bringing back skinny jeans, a mainstay of the late-aughts/early-tens era; Aaron Esh is directly referencing Kate Moss for Topshop in his collections; and Masha Papova’s AW24 show did away with her signature Y2K aesthetic for a quick sojourn into the 2010s. If this direction of travel is to be believed, then soon the office siren could have completely transformed into a geek – just look at Hadid’s glasses as our first piece of evidence. No, she did not simply “feel like wearing another pair”. Those glasses are the warning shot in a wave that could banish the office siren forever, and resurrect the dormant geek. Be warned, and – most importantly – be prepared.