Are some decades just better at fashion than others?
‘A design 10 years ahead of its time is indecent; 10 years after, it’s hideous’
The Eighties were such a polarising decade, politically, culturally… so it’s not surprising that the fashions still split the jury. In the week of Princes William’s and Harry’s documentary about their mother, the fault lines have clarified: those who look back on the decade’s clothes fondly tend not to have been around when it was actually unfolding.
Those who shudder at the clunky proportions, unsophisticated footwear and mullet hair tendencies are generally those who had to live through them first hand. I hated the fashion of the Eighties and I still do. But that could just be me.
It does raise the question of what makes an era classic – the Fifties – and what leaves it in the dungheap of curiosity. Time is a huge factor. In 1937, James Laver, the art historian and V&A curator, worked out a 150-year timeline for fashion. To précis, he suggested that a design that was 10 years ahead of its time was generally considered indecent; while 10 years after its moment, it’s usually regarded as hideous – 20 years after, it’s dismissed as ridiculous; 50 years makes it appear quaint; 70 years, charming; 150 years, and it’s back to being beautiful. Laver was evidently on to something, even if his timeline has itself suffered from time warp. Revisions happen much faster now.
Are some decades inherently better at fashion than others? The Eighties has been revived at least three times already. Yet the resurrections have always felt a bit forced, extremely dilute, and only of real interest to lovers of kitsch and the so-bad-it’sgood genre.
The Fifties, on the other hand, apart from their 20-year exile to fashion Siberia during the Sixties and Seventies (see
Laver’s timeline) have been in style for women across the board for decades. Shirt waisters, kitten heels, bracelet length sleeves – they’ve all become such staples that we barely even think of them as the property of a specific era.
Is it because those small waists and accentuated hips and breasts play to a classic ideal of female beauty? Or is it because, in some details, the Fifties, with its simpler pleasures and expectations, though not its socially repressive mores, appeals?
If each era is a reaction against the previous, it follows that some decades will subscribe to our instinctive aesthetic preferences, while others will challenge them. Lucky Grace Kelly for coming to the
world’s attention in the Fifties. And lucky Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy for floating across the Sixties, the first half of which, with its delicate, ladylike athletic lines, was particularly suited to them both.
Hepburn and Kennedy were outstandingly stylish and elegant, and would probably have looked wonderful in any era, yet even they weren’t at their best in the Eighties – Google it if you don’t believe me.
Both women helped define their eras, just as Diana has, for better or worse, come to define the Eighties. While the princess shimmered through the decade (she had the some gauzy qualities of Marilyn Monroe), her clothes from that period often look like curiosities now.
It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that she truly hit her stride. Now there was a fashion decade (or is that just me again?). The sleeker silhouettes, the melting away of brash Eighties colours, jarring accessories and awkward proportions… the Nineties were to the Eighties what the Romantics were to the panniered Bourbons. How clever of the Nineties to map Diana’s personal trajectory from spurned Royal to independent global figure.