Asking because I have a lot of old family photos and a lot of the ways family members looked in say, 1978 in terms of clothes or hair, doesn’t look much different until around 1984 or 1985.
I’ll give an example: There’s a photo of my grandpa from 1981 (he was 52 at the time) and he has ear length sideburns. In a photo from the beginning of 1982, my father (28) had a thick beard with 70s style center parted hair that is roughly chin length. In a photo at the end of 1982 he no longer has the beard, but has sideburns which extend just below his ear and his hair is the same mid length, center parted style. The center parting of his hair and the sideburn length remains consistent with photos back to at least 1974. Clothes in this period are still 70s Earth Tones. By 1985, his hair is cropped short, his clothes are preppy as opposed to Hippie-ish and his overall look is much more in tune with “The 80s”(pastels, etc). After 1984, he didn’t grow his hair long again until around the end of '88 and that was in the form of a mullet.
In photos from around this same period - 1980-1983 - female members of my family in photos have Fawcett style hair and only around '84 does it begin to morph into the 80s version of teased hair.
Am curious if this is true of your own experience of that period
I’m curious whether you think fashions and tastes change in years ending in 0. Why would they?
Do you think that some fashions from 1968 persisted until 74?
In answer to your question. I entered college in 78. Don’t recall my clothing changing much. At some point around 80, preppie became a thing. There was some book about it. A couple of years later, grunge got bigger.
By 78, you didn’t see the worst of the huge bellbottoms, platform shoes, silky shirts, etc. from the late 60s-early 70s.
I think this is just a matter of how our brains work. We group things in tens as it pertains to years and fashion (and music). But really, fashion is more fluid than that. And even if you’re not one to keep up with the latest trends, clothing manufactures are.
The 2020s are starting in less than a month. You mean you’re not going shopping on January 1 and replacing your entire wardrobe with whatever the new '20s fashion trend is?
You have to totally distinguish culturally between the early 70s and the late 70s; I’d set the dividing line somewhere around 1973-1974. A large number of milestones around that time: the OPEC (“arab”) Oil Embargo, the US withdrawal from Vietnam and the Fall of Saigon, Nixon’s resignation, a period of severe monetary inflation, and the early pioneers of punk rock. Just as the “50s” culturally didn’t end until around 1963-1964.
No, I don’t think that. But in our brains, we tend to group decades into “eras” of time and with those ideas of eras come certain mental associations. Most people would automatically associate the 1960s for example more with The Beatles and psychedelic rock than they would with Doo Wop, even though both were huge aspects of different parts of the same decade. When people think of ‘the 80s’ they tend to think of Miami Vice style fashions, Sixteen Candles, big teased hair and shoulder pads for women, Magnum PI and whatnot.
The “transitional” eras of decades - the organic aspects of how decades gain an identity - tend to be forgotten. Like how it’s generally forgotten that 1960-February 1964 was basically just a continuation, with some new trends, of the late 50s. It’s forgotten in our cultural memory.
I’m personally trying to do that, revamp my own style almost totally for the coming decade. This decade for me personally has been one long unending rollercoaster and I’m looking forward to some good times.
70s style fashions were not still in style in the early 80s. But there were some idiots with absolutely no fashion sense who continued to wear them. Like me, for example.
Sometimes it was intentional. I refused to wear Izod or Ocean Pacific shirts.
70s fashions kinda ended around 1978 or so. There was a punk movement in the late 70s that evolved into the New Wave movement in the early 80s. Think Flock of Seagulls haircuts and that sort of thing, but toned down quite a bit for normal folks. Punk was never that popular (it was intentionally counter-culture) but New Wave did become very fashionable. But that was only for folks who considered themselves to be trendy. Normal folks were still mostly in 70s era fashion, toned down a bit. And, god help them, a lot of people were still listening to disco. John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John fashions were the most dominant from about 1978 to about 1982 or so, in my memory at least.
The preppie movement didn’t really take hold until about 1983 or so.
Absolutely. in the US. generally the East and West coasts are the trendsetters, Chicago being the biggest city in between being relatively up to date but things can filter slowly and sometime strangely in between, and even sometimes in the big metropolises.
That’s gotta be the book I was vaguely remembering. While in college, it seemed to have been adopted by the Greeks (which DEFINITELY did not include me and my friends.)
I LOVE this!
I’ve been watching the Andy Griffith Show lately. The early 60s styles are FAR more reminiscent of what I think of as the 50s, than the miniskirts, bellbottoms, and long hair on men I remember from the late-60s. In fact, the more I think of it, it almost seems as tho style decades shifted closer to the 5s than the 0s…
This is absolutely true. Speaking from personal experience, the 60s didn’t really end until the early-mid 1970s, the 70s didn’t end until 1983 or so, and the 80s didn’t end until right about 1992-1993 when grunge came about.
Can’t really say when the 90s ended though, or whatever the next decade was. They seem far more ambiguous than the prior decades to me.
While fashion trends on TV or in magazines tend to switch very abruptly, in the real world especially outside of really big trend-setting cities they tend to spread much more slowly. If your family weren’t trendsetters in the middle of NYC or LA, fashion changes just didn’t get to them nearly as quickly. If their friends or people in towns where they hung out were all wearing ‘70s hair’ and earth tones, then they weren’t out of fashion for their own social group. Also, individual people often find a look that they like and stick with it even if it goes in or out of mainstream fashion. There are guys who did the ‘open collar, hairy chest, gold medallion’ thing or stalked smoke-filled bars in leisure suits long after the fashion died out. This was a lot stronger back when fashions were more distinct (90s vs 2000s vs 2010s don’t see as big of a change as 60s vs 70s vs 80s) and when there was less instant communication.
And a lot of the ‘80s look’ didn’t really catch on until the late 80s anyway, even for trend setters - Miami vice didn’t even air until 1984, for example, even though it’s considered one of the most 80’s looking shows around.
As I recall, '70’s fashions weren’t even popular in the '70’s. Plaid bell bottom pants and platform shoes on men, gawd! I am waiting for the return of bra-less halter tops for women, that would be fine.
I remember reading sometime that TV shows are greatly intended to sell fashion/products. It said that the way they portray the “dorky” characters is to dress them in current or recently past styles. Basically like the average viewer likely wears.
Fashion was changing very rapidly throughout the 70s. Compare the JC Penny Christmas catalog from 1977 with the one from 1979. Totally different looks.
Same thing for the 1980s.
Unlike today, people at the time who cared about fashion would get rid of lots of clothes because they were “out of style.” Some people, of course, did not. In the mid to late 70s, there were still people who were dressing like hippies. They were seen as a joke, and we kids would say, “Oh look, hippies!” Similarly, in the 1980s, you’d see people in their 60s and older still wearing their polyester “matched separates” (ugh, OMG), but it wasn’t all that common.
So the short answer to your question is: yes, and they stood out, since fashion was changing quickly.
