I’ve been pondering this question for a while, but have been hesitant to post it here since I suspect the answer(s) may be subjective. But this GD thread, The 80s were the most philosophically stable decade of the past half-century inspired me to go ahead and ask away.
First, let me establish my own relevant data so that the dividing line is established: I was born in 1966 and graduated from high school in 1984. So for the purposes of this question, I’m going to refer to two general groups of people: those who “grew up” prior to the 1980s, and those who “grew up” during the 1980s. By “grew up” I mean “entered adulthood”. I’ll disregard those who “grew up” in the 1990s and later, as I feel they are too recent for proper analysis here.
Now on to my observations and questions.
For quite a long time now, I’ve been able to guess someone’s approximate age group by their hair and clothing styles. From what I’ve seen, there are large numbers of people who just can’t seem to let go of the hair style they wore in high school and/or their 20s. For example, my mom (graduated 1962) has worn the same basic hairstyle, with minor variations, for as long as I can remember. I can identify men who are the same age or older than my dad by the way they continue to this very day either trying to comb what’s left of their hair into the wavy Bryl-Creem’d styles of their youth, or else maintaining the same flat top they wore in the military. I’m certain my dad would still be wearing a flat top if he still had hair on the top of his head (but he started going seriously bald and switched to a combover in his late 20s). Men of those generations often poke fun at modern kids wearing their baseball caps backwards, but to me they look just as silly wearing their own caps forward, but crumpled and cocked at a “jaunty angle”.
I’ve seen plenty of '60s-era women who maintained their beehives and permanent waves into the following decades. Men of the late '60s/early '70s who won’t let go of their long, unstyled hair (despite now-massive bald crowns, ala Gallagher) and beards/sideburns. Late '70s women with Farrah Fawcett hair, and late '70s men with feathered hair. Wide-legged jeans. Disco-era men who still wear a thick mustache, open shirt, and gold medallion.
And that brings me to my own generation: the mid-to-late '80s crowd. There seems to have been a paradigm shift at this time, at least where I live (Washington state). In 2004 I attended my 20 year high school reunion. I was pleasantly surprised. Nobody was dressed in neon colors. No torn, acid-washed jeans. No spandex or snakeskin miniskirts 
I didn’t see a single man with a mullet. None of the women (or men) had hairsprayed/gelled “big hair” or heavy blue eyeshadow. In fact, everybody at the reunion (and other classmates I’ve run into over the years) was stylistically up-to-date. Not in a “trying to look like their teenage kids” kind of way, but in an age-appropriate, current adult fashion kind of way.
What happened? What is it about the '80s generation that we were able to so quickly and easily discard the fashions of our youth, where previous generations continue to hang on to theirs?
The only answer I can come up with is summed up in a line from the Mark Wills song, “Nineteen Somethin’”, which is a song about being a young kid in the '70s and a teenager/young adult in the '80s:
In other words, '80s styles were so over-the-top that even those of us who loved them at the time can look back and realize how silly we looked. We say, “it was fun while it lasted, but it’s time to move on.”
What say you?
