A masterful analysis, pokey. You should work that into a dissertation!
Thank you but I think I confused myself a lot.
To make it more simple for myself, in 1984 Sixteen Candles gives you a snapshot of the styles. The boys in the Buffalo photo are out of style and look like geeks. The guys in the LA photo are like the dream boy in Sixteen Candles. The girls in the LA photo are like the evil rich girlfriend in Sixteen Candles and it was not the cool thing to be that girl. The cool thing was to be half way between Flashdance and the rich girl. The girls in the Buffalo photo aren’t out of style yet but they need to cut their hair before the 1985 yearbook comes out to stay in style. Beyond that they need to look more like the LA girls. But the LA girls look like the snooty girlfriend or older sister in Sixteen Candles and their look is still reviled as snobish and bad by fashionable girls. In another couple of years, that attitude will change, but the LA girls don’t know that. Nobody knows it in 1984. By 1985 people will start to see it. So I’m thinking the LA kids don’t count as early adopters.
In the late 70s/early 80s when it was cool to be working class and things like Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel and sexy steelworkers were still cool, people in New York or LA validated it by adopting it first and making it a real fashion. But some girl in Buffalo who was not doing it to be cool wouldn’t get credit for being ahead of the fashion curve. So if that girl doesn’t count as the early adopter of the trend, then the LA girls don’t count as early adopters of the rich girl trend. I guess this is what I am trying to say about those photos. It’s just that to think about it you have to remember back specifically to what was in style that year and see how it was a transition year.
I find it so interesting to think about because I was a middle class 13 year old girl trying to be trendy at the time and I thought about these things an awful lot back then. Even if I am off track I find it fun to remember these things and it seems so profound to me to realize that Molly Ringwald and Denise from the Cosby show were cool to me for a reason and it was that they were moving teenage girl fashion forward to the second half of the 80s. They were the vanguard for teen girl fashion that year and they were a bridge in the class wars between Allentown and Beverly Hills 90210. It’s like I have explained Molly Ringwald to myself after all these years and created order from chaos in my mind. That’s why I got overly excited about it.
Yeah, but look at the jeans on the guy in the foreground, waist high and rather tight. You wouldn’t have seen that in the 1990s. Well you would have on me, probably, if I’d been in high school then, but then I’ve spent my entire life in a time warp.
pokey, your class-based social critique of the fashions makes sense to me, comrade. 
No, really, I think you have a handle on it.
The ironic twist comes in, of course, when the girl from Buffalo is the original fashion-forward but doesn’t get the credit for it, because she doesn’t get to determine what’s trendy. So the power to determine trendiness actually becomes more important than being creative enough to put together the damn look in the first place. :smack:
You reminded me of a book by Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (University of Chicago Press, 1996). On the topic of “ethnic chic,” which was a huge fashion trend in India the past 20 years, Tarlo points out a hip urban woman in Bombay can dress like a backward villager and be on the cutting edge of fashion. But a well-to-do woman in a provincial town would not dare to wear the styles of peasants (however colorful and gorgeous they are in India, very colorful and gorgeous indeed). Unlike the trendy Bombay urbanite, the provincial town woman is close enough to the peasantry that she has to distinguish herself from them to maintain her social status. The smart set in Bombay is international and cosmopolitan, another world altogether.
The first looks to me to be late '70s and the second mid 80’s.
What a fine looking bunch of kids. I wonder what they grew up to be.
Now, after having read the tread, I can say that I grew up poor than dirt in the South Bronx and that 'fro, that Farrah flip, the sweatshirt with the color ripped out and that very cheap t-shirt with the tranfer on madness was what we poor people wore in the late 70’s in the Bronx.
So maybe location does have a little to do with it.
I agree that class is a major factor.
I spent this summer at a photo studio that does senior portraits for schools all over the Bay Area. I saw thousands of teenagers, dressed in their favorite outfits, from a huge range of class backgrounds. I also went to their homecoming dances.
Generally, you could tell what school a kid was the moment they walked in just by looking at them. One thing I noticed is that the girls in the rich schools always have straight shiny hair. They also apply their make-up like thirty-year-olds…not necessarily subtle, but relying more on neutral colors and more likely to involve eyeliner and blush. Fashion-wise, the schools were all very different. The poorer schools were more adventurous and seemed more fashion conscious. Some of their creations were amazing. They also seemed to follow more trends. For example, at the poor schools wearing children’s backpacks featuring cartoon characters was very in, and I never saw that at the rich schools. The rich schools were definitely more conservative, fashion-wise. And they were less brand-conscious. Overall, the kids at the rich school were most likely to resemble mini-adults, and when they were fashionable it was the kid of fashion you see 40 year olds wearing on Sex in the City.
The dances were interesting. The kids at the poor schools tended to wear jazzed up street clothes. They clearly put a lot of time and effort into their outfits- you saw a lot of stuff like boys and girls wearing matching sports jerseys (hers tailored in to a revealing dress and accesorized with matching heels and a purse) covered in hand-applied rhinestones. The fashions were outrageous and creative. Also, the boys were just as fashionable as the girls.
At the rich school, they tended to wear formalwear to even minor dances. A girl wouldn’t dream of going in something other than a dress from a party-dress store. They seemed to be in a completly different fashion paradigm- this year a kind of 80’s flashdance meet 20’s flappers look was popular. Sometimes the girls wore some outrageous stuff, but in more of a fashion victim way than a creative way. The boys uniformly wore suits complete with jackets and ties. The effect was like a particularly fashionable company christmas party.
This was my experience in a small Utah town as well (BTW–Jennshark–which small town you from?–for me it was thriving metropolis of Price–population 10,000). But in my Highschool it was Metro SLC that was the trendsetter–and I have no doubt that SLC was several years behind the east and west coast cities.