Last week, I went to Revolution in White River Junction to clear my brain. It was pouring rain outside, I was done with classes and exams, and I needed to be in an artsy bohemian environment that could make me forget about work for a brief moment.
The owner and I ended up remembering the 80s, her through images and me through memories. I was in my twenties in the 1980s, Nancy was barely born.
I told her that the 1980s style could not be reduced to one dominant look. Looking at movies from that decade, for example, fashion was all over the place. It depended on which social class you came from, on where you lived, and what you were doing for work.
So for instance, in Desperately Seeking Susan, middle class propriety, as played by Rosanna Arquette meets edgier punk as played by Madonna.
In Tootsie and 9 to 5, it’s the synthetic, big shoulder padded work place.
In Diva, it’s European sleek, short skirts, short hair, very stylized.
The 80s was also the Aids decade. Emaciated faces, anorexic bodies. Not exactly a style per se. But influential in how the body damaged by disease became visually familiar and perhaps even seductive for those who latch on to fashion statements that involve inflicting pain upon oneself.
It was loose, comfortable clothes for me and a short sculpted hair cut.
With so many different styles speaking simultaneously, it’s no wonder that, henceforward, fashion became a free for all.
It was also the decade of the woman in the "power suit" as more and more of us entered the workplace. The recently deceased former Prime Minister of the UK Margaret Thatcher wore suits and dresses with ribbon ties that remind me of another style that dominated that decade, a conservative, no nonsense, no frills look that many women wore to work in order to blend in, from the executive board room to the Houses of Parliament.
As Suzy Menkes wrote in a recent NYT article, "Mrs. Thatcher expressed in her persona exactly where working women stood in the 1980s: on low-heeled court shoes and in tailored suits that were a carapace of protection in what was still essentially a man’s world." What that suit did to feminism? It might have propelled it forward and pulled it backward at the same time. Women conformed to a male ethos, but women also earned their own income. Women attained power through their profession, and some were able to use that power to benefit other women.
The 1980s were a watershed moment for all women. We entered the public realm and we have since remained there, not necessarily agreeing with each other politically or aesthetically for that matter.
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