Duality, power and authority: Anna Myntekær and Yoko Maja Rahbek take Bonnetje's signature suiting to the 9 - 5 office this season, with sexy and subversive twists
Ever since the trailer for Babygirl dropped, traditional offices – and the suits that populate them – have felt distinctly sexy. With Bonnetje’s autumn/winter '25 show, corporate attire just got even sexier. The emerging brand’s runway debut (last season’s airport-themed collection was shown via presentation) offered a play on nine-to-five dressing that would probably violate most HR policies. It’s a fitting choice for a brand whose signature is upcycled suiting. “We work with the suit,” says Anna Myntekær, who is joined by her co-founder Yoko Maja Rahbek. “So we work with places where they use the suit. Last time it was the airport and transit, and this time it’s the office.”
Bonnetje’s take on office dressing explores a certain duality, or rather, the notion of a double life – the most mundane example of which is the balance of work and life (or its bro-y counter part, work hard / play hard). But the designers also turned to darker double lives, like American Psycho’s corporate murderer Patrick Bateman or the contemporary dystopian workplace series Severance. To hammer this notion home, the collection is called Doublages, the French word for “dubbing”. “We started to work around this very broad theme of power and authority,” says Maja Rahbek, noting that they first looked at the role of the suit in films like The Godfather. “But then it developed more into modern life and how the suit is worn today, in a business kind of way.” Given that both Maja Rahbek and Myntekær are balancing a burgeoning brand with raising two young children, their own relationship with the work-life balance is predictably complicated.
Practically speaking, that duality manifests in alluring tailoring that finds remixed suits as body-hugging siren frocks with plunging backs and cutouts exposing hip bones or just a hint of crack. Elsewhere, suit lining has been reimagined as slinky lingerie – the most NSFW option out there. Added to the mix are upcycled plastic sleeves fashioned into see-through pencil skirts (another workplace no-no) and retro slated blinds reimagined as suggestive tube dresses (they open and close, after all). Wafting through the cavernous show space was a bespoke scent made in collaboration with scent artist Niklaus Mettler, from AirSolution – it features notes of lipstick and ink.
Though Maja Rahbek and Myntekær have never held down traditional office jobs themselves (though Maja Rahbek was once a receptionist for a restaurant company), Bonnetje HQ is in an empty office space, surrounded by stereotypical office buildings from the 1980s. In fact, the show itself took place in one of them, just a few blocks from where the collection was designed. “It’s a very ugly space,” says Maja Rahbek. “But it’s cool.”
See all the looks from Bonnetje’s autumn/winter '25 collection below:
