By Alyce Wilson
(Standard-Journal,
March 12, 1999)

The Year 2000 is arriving soon, and you know what that means.

Good-bye, bell bottoms. Hello, peg legs. If retro trends continue, we're due for a surge of Eighties nostalgia.

The mid-1980s saw a return to such Sixties Mod fashions as mini-skirts and short bobbed hair. The 1990s have boasted such retro looks as bell bottoms, Brady Bunch striped shirts and velour V-necks.

The Wedding Singer

With the dawn of the new millennium we can expect a resurgence of day glo colors, acid washed jeans and cut-off Flashdance sweatshirts.

Yuck.

With any luck designers will pick and choose what they decide to revive. They didn't, for example, bring back the worst colors and patterns of the 1970s.

As a friend of mine once said, most of the colors in the Seventies looked like they already had dirt ground into them. This color scheme applied not only to clothing but to kitchens and bathrooms, as well. In contrast, the retro 1970s look was more refined, like an idealized, clean cut dream of the Seventies.

Yes, there were platform shoes and bell bottoms, but no polyester hip huggers or mustard yellow cowl necks.

We can hope, then, that the more offensive Eighties fashions, like multi-colored leg warmers and red Thriller jackets, will remain in the closets.

In the back. Far in the back.

If you wonder what the idealized version of the Eighties may be like, when it arrives in 2005, watch The Wedding Singer.

Although it pokes gentle fun at 1980s hair, fashions and music, the movie portrays the Eighties with a naive wholesomeness the decade never possessed.

Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign aside, the 1980s found ingenious ways for alternative culture to surface.

That wasn't tobacco the Brat Packers were smoking in The Breakfast Club (1985).

As pointed out by VH1's Pop Up Video, the bandanas worn by Adam Ant and other Eighties rock stars mimic signals used by the S&M community.

And "street punk" fashion like mohawks, torn jean jackets and pins made the mainstream.

The naivete shown in movies like The Wedding Singer neutralizes the Music Revolution of the 1980s. Just as the Fifties revolutionized teen culture, the Eighties revolutionized pop culture.

British groups like A Flock of Seagulls and The Thompson Twins brought more than big hair and bizarre costumes: They also heralded the New Wave in music. Before long you couldn't get a record made if you didn't use a synthesizer.

New Wave artists cultivated an anarchic, artistic chic that said, "The future is now. And it's ambivalent, androgynous and fun." If you want proof, just watch early M-TV videos like "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats.

Until the late 1980s, when experimentation gave way to commercialism, pop culture tried out new ways of looking at and being in the world.

Hopefully, they won't forget that when Eighties nostalgia hits.

Copyright 1999 by Alyce Wilson

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