Popped Collars: Poppin’ Out All Over
Jan24

Popped Collars: Poppin’ Out All Over

By Julie Anderson It’s 1983. You want to look preppy or rebellious or young. You want to look modern. You want to show the world that you’re trendy. What’s the easiest way to do this? Pop your collar, baby! Though I was wildly unaware of it at the time (although I certainly knew the word “preppy” in the eighties) there was a book that got the whole upturned-collar-on-the-polo-shirt ball rolling. It was Lisa Birnbach’s satirical The...

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Fierce Fashion and Mad Max
Jan17

Fierce Fashion and Mad Max

By Julie Anderson In Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek TV shows and movies and George Lucas’s Star Wars films, we saw one version of futuristic style. They offered us future fashions that were sleek, clean, bold, and colorful. Picture Captain Kirk’s gold and black V-neck and Princess Leia’s pristine white gown. Even Han Solo, that scoundrel, had shiny black boots and fresh-looking attire. No holes, patches, or frays on that dashing young...

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Oooh, Shiny! Rockin’ Metallics in the Eighties and Today
Jan17

Oooh, Shiny! Rockin’ Metallics in the Eighties and Today

By Julie Anderson We loved candy bright pastels, fluorescent eye-poppers, and gritty-tough black clothes in the eighties. Soft, subdued, natural shades: not so much. Perhaps it’s easiest to say we liked colors that didn’t appear in nature all that often. It follows, then, that metallic clothes and accessories were a futuristic trend that we snatched right up in our lace-gloved little hands. Shiny! Eye catching! Judy Jetson-esque! We...

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Top 5 80s Summer Fashions
Jun02

Top 5 80s Summer Fashions

By Ryan Zimmerman Ryan here! Back again with the Top 5 Countdown. This time it is Top 5 80s Summer Fashions. As Buster Poindexter would say, it’s “Hot, Hot, Hot!” and so are these summertime fashion trends.   5. Members Only Jackets Yes, I know these aren’t too summer-ish. But hey, sometimes there are cool summer nights, and if the night chill gives you the need to be ill, you can slip on the M.O. You know how you...

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Original Jams
May22

Original Jams

Those mid-length surfer shorts in outrageously bright colors and patterns are actually a brand, the way Band-Aid is used to refer to all wound-covers (probably because the alternative is “wound-cover”). Anyway, Jams is whole line of surfer-styled clothing, but it’s the shorts that really captured our fashion imagination in the mid-80s (their zenith was the summer of 1986). Their popularity in the 80s was a resurgence of their...

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