> CD #45: '80s kid
Do you have a favourite fashion era? I’d say three, maybe four, historical periods really appeal to me, such as the interwar years (think Nancy Mitford’s “eccentric English” style) or the 1950s/60s (think early Betty Draper or, alternatively, Maggie Cheung’s character from In the Mood for Love). I don’t know why I feel such a strong connection to certain looks from decades before my time, or why I’m not at all interested in, say, Victorian fashion or hippie style. There is no accounting for taste. All I know is if you show me a retro mohair cardigan, or a tweedy coat thrown over a floral tea dress, my brain says, “Yes, please.”
What is clear to me are the roots of my love for ‘80s style. And though I admit that most of the clothes from what is arguably the ugliest fashion decade are truly atrocious—acid wash, anyone?—there is something deep within me that will forever be devoted to the 1980s. Obviously it comes down to nostalgia. I was a child of the ‘80s. The first outfits I recall putting together on my own (with tremendous pride, I’ll have you know) involved stirrup pants and jelly shoes. And I associate ‘80s fashion with the uncomplicated optimism of childhood, when I simply enjoyed clothes without worrying about what other people thought of them, or me.
A part of me will always be an ‘80s kid. In fact, here is a list of stuff I’m still pretty keen on:
Bomber jackets
The combination of black and pink
Dusty rose, also hunter green
Sweatshirts as non-athletic wear
Neon
Colorblocking
Fanny packs
Ray-Ban Wayfarers
Nostalgia for the 80s is why I love G.L.O.W. and have a weakness for synth-pop. But until now, I haven’t really examined what that nostalgia actually does for me.
Turns out it does a lot, from increasing optimism and reducing your experience of physical pain to affecting how warm you feel in a cold room. (If that’s true, I could definitely stand to generate more nostalgia in my office at the university.)
It can promote a unified sense of self, as well as build stronger connections to loved ones, affecting both how you deal with the past and how you approach the future. Nostalgia researcher Dr. Krystine Batcho calls it a “a wonderfully complex paradoxical experience,” adding:
The irreversibility of time means that we absolutely cannot go back in time so [nostalgia] helps us to deal with the conflict of the bitter longing for what can never be again together with the sweetness of having experienced it and being able to revisit it and relive it again.
This is not to say I had the best childhood, nor would I ever want to go back to the ‘80s. Life was far from perfect, and I am sorting through a lot of heavy stuff from the past as I work on a new graphic memoir. But I’ll take whatever small benefits to my brain I can get from moments of nostalgia, however brief or bittersweet.
And I’ll leave you with one of my favourite comics memories from childhood:
Great outfits too, right?
:) Teresa
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I was a teen in the 80s, but my biggest influence came in the early 90s with minimalism—monochromatic dressing in black with big silver jewelry.