By J.C London
J.C London is a girl (well, woman) who was at the vanguard of the ‘80s London scene…and therefore should have known better. (Ed.)
OK, I know the eighties have come back in, but if you weren’t there the first time around, Kittens In Underpants feel duty bound to offer a word of caution from those who survived. After all, knowledge is power.
So. Don’t say you haven’t been warned...
Really High Waist Bands On Trousers
OK, admittedly, they were comfortable. No worrying about the flab hanging over the tops of your hipsters when you adopted a sitting position. But they gave you the appearance of having a waist-to-crotch measurement to rival that of your inside leg. They provided an optical illusion of making you look like a dwarf. And when you sat down they ballooned out as though you had a colostomy bag. I know you didn’t have to breathe in. You - and all the excess material of your ill-fitting baggy trousers - were all gathered in by your Really Wide Belt (worn below rather than threaded through your belt loops to hitch your trousers up even further, guaranteed to lift, separate and render sterile, whatever your gender).
* A subdivision of this faux-pas would be trousers that ended above the ankles, usually thanks to the said Really Wide Hitching Belt.
** Another would be EVERYTHING TUCKED IN to said trousers, including jumpers.
Leggings-Stroke-Footless Tights
WHAT WERE WE THINKING? Even girls with good legs looked rubbish in leggings. Those of us with crap legs somehow convinced ourselves they’d look all right as long as we stood and walked with our toes pointed inwards and our T-shirts were long enough to cover our bums and tied in a knot in the right place on one thigh (another Fashion Faux-Pas in itself).
RaRa Skirts
Including the executive class of RaRa; the Puff Ball
Well, it’s true they made your legs look like those of a six-year-old girl, but when you had the body of a fully sexually mature woman, it just made you look as though you’d just been released into the community.
Over-Sized Double-Breasted Jackets With The Sleeves Rolled Up
Especially when worn with tight, faded jeans, this look gave birth to the dress code for the eighties, Smart But Casualty.
Trimmings and General Overdressing
In the eighties we went trimmings mad. More Is Less became the motto of the era. Not satisfied with the general over-design of the simplest garment (even the classic denim jacket suffered untold humiliation at the hands of the designers, bedecked with embroidery, pockets, buckles, flaps, slashes and padded shoulders), we had to adorn every spare inch of fabric with zips, studs, chains, crosses, ribbons, bows, bits of lace, tinsel and baubles. Added to this would be hats, scarves, gloves, drapes of dangly jewellery, coats over jackets over sleeveless jackets over t-shirts over vests over crop-tops, skirts over trousers, legwarmers over tights, socks and shoes - was it particularly cold in the eighties? Or simply fashion’s cruelest winter.
Guitars and Basses On Really High Straps
OK, I know not everyone wore guitars in the eighties (but if there was any more room on their jackets I’m sure they would’ve done), but the people that did, mentioning no names but you know who they are, are thankfully living out the rest of their days in obsolescence and ridicule or bad TV shows. It didn’t fool anyone into thinking you could actually play your instruments, it only proved you could all swing from side to side in unison. And it looked crap.
Limahl
Red Braces and Spectacle Frames
The good thing about the eighties was that it didn’t matter if you didn’t have a personality. All you had to do was wear red braces or red spectacle frames and everybody thought you did.
Scarves Tied Round Heads, Apache Warrior Style
Alas, when worn down Taunton High Street, this didn’t convince anyone that you were, indeed, an Apache Warrior.
Tram Lines
We all know about the horrors of the mullet, but for some unspoken reason, the true measure of Authenticity was the performance of some kind of additional topiary on the sides of the head. As if a mullet in itself wasn’t enough, it was a kind of Rites of Passage you had to go through to prove you were a true Brave. Those not really as brave as their friends coaxed them into being for the duration of the shave, found some comfort in the fact that if you left your hair long on top you could part it in the middle for home and school, giving a glimmer of hope that your parents wouldn’t notice the bald patches until they grew back. The basic hedge trim was the Tram Line, which could be exposed to greater effect by scraping the remaining strands of hair at the back of the head into a ‘ponytail’.
Brims Without Hats
No, this wasn’t a band, it was the style adopted by girls who were EVEN MORE CLUELESS than anyone else in the eighties, and thought it made them really cute to wear a big wide brim with no hat in it, poking tendrils of bad perm out of the said hole.
NB: There is no point to a hat with no hat in it.
Neon towelling socks with stilettoes
Postmodernism at its very worst. I know we were ironically juxtapositioning counter-cultural iconographies and challenging gender construction, but they just looked crap.
