They Weren't Expensive or High Society….But Boy, Were They Were Popular
While we here at elite-clothes.com are not exactly clothes
horses or what you might call trendy, we have gotten on-board
a number of clothing/accessory fads over the years. Several
of the men in the office confessed to having an ear pierced
sometime between freshman
year of high school and college graduation. More currently,
two-thirds of the men in the office have at least a goatee
and a few more admit to sporting one in the last 5 years.
The women unanimously agreed to having used a curling
iron in their lives.
But let's go back a bit farther and recall some of the
most popular clothes and fads that came around. Today
we'll just focus on the 1970s and 1980s.
As most of the office staff at elite-clothes.com is around
their mid-thirties or approaching forty, going back to
the early '70s is right when most of us were dressing
ourselves and allowed to select what we intended to wear.
One of the first mega-popular T-shirts we remember was
the Adidas shirt. They were one of the more popular shoe
brands at the time and the tee simply had their clover-leaf
looking logo on it. They came in different colors and
every kid in school seemed to have one.
You might have worn it with those blue gym shoes with
the white swirl stripes on the side. They weren't the
world-famous Nike swish of today. They weren't high-tops…….that
trend would still be five or six years away. But everyone
had a pair. I'm not sure if they were Converse or Keds
or what. But you put on those blue gym shoes and your
Adidas shirt and you were ready to go.
By the '80s, the whole Izod fad was over because the people
who still elected to wear the shirts with the little alligator
on the breast were teased too badly. Cool people had moved
on to the hip designs on the Ocean Pacific clothes. And
Reeboks had gained in popularity too. You would wear an
Ocean Pacific tee-shirt with faded, light blue jeans tapered
and self-cuffed at the bottom. Then your high-top Reeboks
were loosely laced so that they never needed tying. You
slipped on the shoes like a pair of slippers and the laces
were strewn perfectly to hang down a few inches on the
side of the shoe.
For the complete picture, think Corey Haim in his hey-day.
Or maybe Kirk Cameron at the very beginning of his rise
to fame.
By the mid-80's, Miami Vice was red hot and wearing the
sport jacket with the sleeves rolled up was huge. So was
the casual top-siders (boat shoes) that you wear without
socks. And we would be totally remiss if we did not include
the Member's Only jacket. That clean, white jacket was
the badge of honor for cool people until they too became
the target of mockery and giggles. The Sopranos even made
fun of the jacket when one of the tough guys wore it to
a gathering about seven years after it became uncool.
Most people made a graduation from Member's Only to a
bleached or weathered-looking jean jacket.
Finally by the late '80s, hair bands and heavy metal were
the kings of the music scene and dictating most of the
fashion trends as well. Girls had huge hair (and many
of the guys too) and wore lots of makeup (guys too!).
Leather jackets, long a trademark of hip, cool dressers,
were in everyone's closet. Some guys even wore fingerless
leather gloves. Jeans were ripped or shredded to have
maximum "cool" effect. Sunglasses were worn
indoors and it was accepted.
In the future, we'll relive the 1990s and early 2000s
fashions. Things became less about looking glamorous and
more about looking cool-casual. But one element never
changes……..the overall goal is to always have
on the hip clothes of the moment and to stop wearing them
before they become lame.
Or a joke on an episode of The Sopranos.
