1980s REVISITED:Fashion in the 1980s was about bling - before bling had been invented, writes Robert O'Byrne
BIG HAIR, BIG SHOULDERS, big egos . . . everything about 1980s style was steroid-pumped up to size extra large. A scene in the 1987 movie Wall Street shows Michael Douglas (as "lunch is for wimps" financier Gordon Gekko) walking on the beach, clutching what looks like an enormous boulder to his ear. It's an early mobile phone. That film, along with the following year's Working Girl (in which Sigourney Weaver advises Melanie Griffith to "rethink the jewellery") defined the decade's aspirational fashion.
Everyone wanted to be a business behemoth - or at least to dress like one. This, after all, was the era that saw the birth of both the yuppie and the power suit, the latter being the preferred costume of the former. Women either wore bright, tight jackets with doorwide shoulder pads (intended to convey the impression they were running multinational corporations and not just an errand to the local supermarket) or they opted for slinky dresses, still with broad shoulders, of the sort popularised by Joan Collins et al in Dynasty.
Unlike the matte-black, minimalist 1990s, colour was rampant and the more lurid the better. (Think Don Johnson in Miami Vice. Some of those ice cream-hued suits with sleeves rolled up to the elbow had been made by Irish designer Nicky Wallace).
It was bling before bling had been invented. Of course, this being an Ireland seemingly in the grip of a permanent recession, our efforts to achieve the appropriately grandiose look had to be done on the cheap.
At least, there was the attainable fashion of the Mirror, Mirror chain - until it went bust in 1984. But by then, Next, with its cut-price versions of the business suit, had arrived on these shores. Somehow, we managed to look big, albeit while depending on a minuscule budget.