By now it should be obvious to everyone that we are all, in a real and quantifiable sense, going back. Even a mainstream media organ as lost in the fog of Current Year chronological snobbery as the New York Times is now forced to admit that American culture has regressed as hard and as far as the 1980s.
I have spent the last month trapped in a wrinkle in time. Not the film, mind you, though that was quite the fashion moment, and not the book. Rather, sitting by the runways, hour after hour, day after day, city after city between Feb. 7 and March 7, I could feel myself slipping further down a wormhole into the past. One moment it was 2018; the next it was 1981 (or ’85, or ’88).
But here’s the thing: I have been there before. I’m not sure I want to go back.
You have to go back.
This time round it was the 1980s, a decade that has been making a comeback of sorts around the aesthetic edges for the last few years. But while in previous seasons, its re-emergence was tempered by assorted other decades and influences, it has now reached critical mass.
And it was all set to an ’80s soundtrack: Terence Trent D’Arby and Sade at Ferragamo, “Tainted Love” and“Take On Me” at Balmain, Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run” from “Working Girl” at Thom Browne. Julie de Libran, the creative director of Sonia Rykiel, even reconstituted Bananarama (live!) for her label’s 50th-anniversary show. With the requisite stonewashed denim (Miu Miu), lots of neon (Prada, Versace) and stirrup pants (Tom Ford) to match.
I guess we should have expected it, given the current conjunction of political and cultural events, all of which seem to steer a designer’s thoughts naturally to the go-go decade.
Given the ascension of Donald Trump, with his suit and big red tie uniform (with its nod to Gordon Gekko and Ronald Reagan) and his unabashed love of gilding not just the lily, but every surface under the sun, the better to convey aesthetic bombast: big hair, big gems, big belts. Bigly! O.K., big league. (Also, for that matter, his past connection to Blaine Trump, his former sister-in-law and the erstwhile socialite who put the pouf in pouf skirt.)
There is always a certain fascination, I know, with the style of decades one has missed, and fashion is nothing if not obsessed with the generation of consumers that missed the ’80s, or were too young to remember them — the millennials and Gen Z. So maybe designers are simply offering them what they want (or don’t yet know they want, but actually do).
And those generations may well embrace all this ’80s muchness; may wear it with the dose of irony and glee that the artifacts of the past always seems to give those who experience them for the first time, even if it’s in an ersatz fashion (pun intended). Certainly, the bunch of millennial celebs in the front row at Miu Miu — Stacy Martin, Zoe Kazan, Rowan Blanchard and Lucy Boynton, among them — hooting and hollering with glee as they watched Elle Fanning, 19, open the show in a big suede jacket and big bouffant, a scarf knotted just so around her neck, seemed to think it was a hell of a fun idea.
But speaking as someone who is old enough to have actually lived through it — I was in high school and college in the 1980s; my mother was one of the ceiling-cracking women in those big-shouldered suits — I confess to having mixed feelings about the resurgence. Admittedly, it could be because I have mixed feelings about many of my adolescent choices, and the clothes I wore simply suffer by association, but I think it goes beyond that. I want to believe we are moving forward, and this feels like moving back.
