There was a time when jeans were just jeans. You bought them to wear to work on the construction site or to just lay around the house in on the weekend. That all ended in the 80s with the introduction of "designer" jeans. No brand was more successful out of the gate than Calvin Klein and undoubtedly no one was more singularly responsible for the success of CK jeans than the product's public face, Brooke Shields.

In the most infamous of a series of racy (for their time) tv commercials the then 15 year old Ms. Shields stared into the camera and breathlessly declared "You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing." Oh my.

Here is that scandalous ad from 1980 which wound up getting banned in many parts of the country but would go on to nonetheless create the basic template for nearly every other designer jeans ad that followed. (Somebody needs to tell that young lady that good girls don't sit like that!)

"You talkin' to me?"

Shoulder pads have been in and out of the closet since the 1930s. During the World War II era they became popular due to the militarization of women's fashion and perhaps nobody from this era personified the look better than Lauren Bacall. After the war women's fashion in particular took a turn back toward a more relaxed profile and big shoulders were out.

All that changed in the 80s however when shoulder pads returned with a vengeance. New Wave bands used the look to separate themselves visually from their 70s forebearers. Women used them to achieve a more aggressive personal silhouette as they worked their way up the corporate ladder and TV shows like "Dynasty" made shoulder pad driven formal wear seem like a must have. And speaking of Dynasty; perhaps no 80s star personified the look to a greater extent than Joan Collins, who seemed to have been born into them. They lent her distant, seductive aura a sense of man-eating menace that was emulated (with varying degrees of success) from coast to coast for the better part of the decade.

During our favorite decade mullet mania seemed to encompass the globe. It was like some terrible virus that you could pick up if you went into a salon;

Girlfriend upon seeing boyfriend's new mullet: "What happened to you!?"
Boyfriend sporting Hairstyle Of Shame: "I went into the unisex salon at the corner. Just for a trim!"
GF: "I told you you'd catch mullet if you went into one of those places. Now we'll have to cancel Christmas at my parents!"
BFwHOS: "I'm so sorry. So, so sorry."

Conversations just like this were heard from Dublin to Tokyo as more and more seemingly normal men succumbed to the cultural contagion. Thankfully by decades end the worst was over and the mullet receded into the shadowy corners of truck stops, Piggly Wiggly's and hockey rinks from whence it came and where it continues to lurk; waiting for a second chance to burst forth upon an unsuspecting populace.

Some things simply defy our ability to explain them.

What would the 80s have been without Doc Martens shoes? They were an essential fashion accessory for everyone from punks to hi-so fashionistas. Supermodels wore them. College kids wore them. I even remember we had a garbage man for a while that wore them.

Chances are Dr Klaus Martens could little have imagined the impact his practical footwear would have on the world when he invented them in 1945 as a way to deal with the aftermath of an ankle injury he'd sustained. Within a decade they were a hit on the continent. Since 1960 when the first British made Doc Martens were sold the shoes have come to symbolize a certain type of British attitude and fashion sense. By the late 70s they were standard issue footwear for London punks and by the 80s anyone who was anyone in music or fashion was wearing them on both sides of 'the pond'.

Doc Martens are still around today, just not the 'must have' accessory they were during the 80s. Oh and by the way, they're not such a symbol of Britain anymore either. In 2003, faced with declining sales in the UK, the company relocated its manufacturing component to China and Thailand in an effort to cut costs. 

Shoes make the man. Or something like that.

The humble but lovable Swatch watch (the name was taken from the marketing concept: the Second Watch, like the second car) was first introduced in Switzerland in 1983. Originally concepted as a way to produce a standard watch using plastic (and therefore driving down the cost and reclaim some market share from the Japanese) the development process was taken over by a marketing consultant named Franz Sprecher whose big idea was to create a complete brand around these plastic watches and to market them as a fun fashion accessory.

His idea was a hit. Millions and millions of Swatches were sold. Young people began wearing them two and even three at at time like bangles. Some girls wore them in their hair.

The Swatch Group (the company that makes the Swatch) could see the writing on the wall however and realized that the fad surrounding their product would fizzle out one day so right from the start they looked at ways to diversify their product line and moved into the aquistion market with a vengence.

Today The Swatch Group owns Tiffany and Co, Longines, Calvin Klein, Pierre Balmain and many other luxury brands and are themselves one of the most recongnizable brands in the world. They also continue to manufacture the product that got them off the ground: the humble Swatch watch.

Classic Swatch Watches of the 80s. Gimme two!

Linda Evangelista burst onto the modeling scene in the 80s and it wasn't long before it seemed like her face was everywhere. She worked for all the biggest fashion houses and appeared countless times on the covers of the industry's most famous magazines. In the late 80s she cut off most of her hair giving her the look that would make her a fashion icon. But the new look didn't come without a price. Most of those same fashion houses cancelled her contract almost immediately after taking a look at her new do. Didn't matter though because what she lost in runway revenue she picked up in commercial revenue. She stayed on top for the better part of a decade before being squeezed out by a new generation models during the 90s.

So what's she up to these days?

After taking time off from modeling for personal reasons and giving birth to a son in 2006, she came back in 2007, signing a big contract with L'Oreal Paris. The following year she signed with Prada and will be the new 'face' of Talbots as well.

She still looks terrific today and seems to have a long second life in modeling ahead of her.

the humble but commercially formidable Sony Walkman

In June 1980 Sony Corporation of Japan introduced the "Walkman" into the American market and people's experience of music would never be the same. The cassette tape had been around for years but had found only niche audiences. Sony's co-founder came up with the basic idea for the Walkman in the late 70s when he was frustrated at having to carry around a bulky cassette tape player on business trips just to listen to music. He had a prototype developed and pitched the idea to the company's chairman as "...a good idea...".

It was that alright and a lot more.

The Walkman took off, eventually selling more than 200,000 units. If you didn't have a walkman in the mid 80s you just weren't happening. It would be like someone today who didn't have a mobile phone.

While the Walkman as it came to be known in the 80s and early 90s would eventually be shoved aside by the digital revolution it's indelible mark on popular culture cannot be over-emphasized. It made wearing  earphones in public acceptable, it cemented the idea that music was not something you had to listen to in a static indoor setting and it helped marked the beginning of the end for vinyl records.

I should note that while the Walkman product did lose it's pre-eminence in the market that doesn't mean it went away. Sony now makes high tech mp3 players sold under the Walkman name, as well as old-fashioned cassette player versions.

In the 80s a lot of former 60s lefties embraced the capitalist tide and moved from the commune into the marketplace. Perhaps no one typified this trend more than Jane Fonda.

The former "Hanoi Jane" of the 60s anti-war movement decided it was time to feel the burn and, in 1982, put her celebrity behind a series of aerobics tapes that became a sensation. Her initial tape "The Jane Fonda Workout" went on to sell a whopping 17 million copies and remains the highest selling exercise video of all-time. It seemed there wasn't an upwardly mobile yuppie female in any major metropolitan area of the US in the mid-80s that didn't own a copy.

Some people claim that the popularity of Ms. Fonda's video actually created a surge in the sale of then new-to-the-market VHS players, (and certainly it put wind in the sails of leg-warmer sales), but no matter how you look at it her videos helped stoke the fire of the workout craze that is still thriving day.

Perhaps no designer came to represent the 80s fashion split with the past more than Giorgio Armani.

He began his love affair with fashion as a window dresser for a Milan department store and eventually became a buyer for their men's wear department. Not long after he became a freelance designer creating his own men's wear line which he marketed through several fashion houses. By 1979 he was ready to go big time and established the Giorgio Armani Corp. He pioneered what were at the time non-traditional advertising methods including designing for film and eventually landed an agreement to design for Miami Vice in the mid 80s. This association turned him into a household name in America and launched him as a superstar in the fashion world.

Among Armani's rules of style for men are:

Today Armani himself is said to be worth something in the neighborhood of $7 billion. Not a bad neighborhood.

Miami Vice was a TV series produced by Michael Mann and starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as a pair of undercover Miami vice detectives. The show more closely resembled a long form music video than Dragnet. But who cared about procedure when you could show cops dressed in Armani driving Ferraris along South Beach? The series was allegedly based on certain actual laws that allowed cops to use property they seized from convicted drug dealers to do their job. Hence: cops in Ferraris. Sounds good to me.

Speaking of sounds: The official Miami Vice soundtrack actually made it to #1 in the US and stayed the #1 album on the charts for an incredible 11 weeks in 1985!

People magazine is often quoted as saying that Miami Vice "was the first show to look really new and different since color TV was invented." It made household names out of Johnson and Armani, influenced the look and sound of the mid/late 80s and ran from 1984 until its cancellation 1989.

You can't get too far into any homage to the 80s before getting around to Michael Jackson. The decade belonged to him the way the 60s belonged to the Beatles. Though "Off the Wall" was technically released in August of 1979 it's full impact wasn't felt until well into 1980. Maybe the most important career move he ever made was to bring Quincy Jones in to produce. Jones was a studio master who'd worked with everyone from Sinatra to Dinah Washington to Dizzy Gillespie and he and Jackson formed a working partnership that created music history. With this album, Jackson became the first solo artist to have four singles from the same album reach the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. And he was just getting started.

Enough talking.

Michael Jackson - Rock with You




Michael Jackson - Official website

George O'Dowd, aka Boy George, put the TV in MTV. Here he is with Culture Club in their first big international hit "Do you really want to hurt me?"



Culture Club - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me by EMI_Music

Nothing says 80s quite like leg warmers. Apparently someone forgot to tell the girls who bought them by the bushel (as though they were some revolutionary advance in clothing) that leg warmers had existed for hundreds of years: we call them pants. But I digress because I love a good fashion trend (plus Chris has just reminded me that he saw my mom wearing a pair of LWs not so long ago. Oops! Love ya mom!

If, like Jennifer here, the thought of wool marshmallows wrapped around your lower legs makes you wanna dance or for that matter if you'd just like to dig deeper into this important subject, you can learn more about the wide world of leg warmers here.

The "disillusioned hippie" look of the 70's gave way to the "guy with his finger stuck in the electrical socket" look of the 80's. From Bono's mullet to these guys, who apparently were standing pretty close to a hair spray factory when it exploded, hair went up and out, and up, and out, and up, and out, and...

 If follicular follies are where it's at for you, click here to read more about the history of big hair.