Six nights and two afternoons a week, the synthesizers blare, the lights flash and the strains of Tears for Fears are heard over Broadway.
In Los Angeles, both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty are hosting major exhibitions of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, the Ur-provocateur who shook the art world some three decades ago.
Crisscrossing the country, Donald Trump, whose towering ambition and penchant for hyperbole marked him as an icon of 1980s excess, is homing in on the Republican presidential nomination, thumping a business book like a combination bible and policy manual — one that was published in 1987.
That same year, Richard Nixon wrote to him that “whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!” (The prediction was actually Mrs. Nixon’s, but “as you can imagine,” President Nixon wrote, “she is an expert on politics.”)
What year is it, anyway?
The 1980s, the more-is-more era, has never left us. It’s been a touchstone for fashion, music and popular culture, remembered fondly but with a shudder, as the butt of jokes and youthful indiscretions with hairstyles and shoulder heights.
But then, a strange thing has been happening. The formerly irredeemable 1980s, it seems, are creeping back to the fore.
“I do see that coming around again,” said Duncan Sheik, who wrote the music and lyrics for “American Psycho,” an ’80s-set Broadway musical that opens Thursday, one that includes both original ’80s-style compositions (written and scored using ’80s synthesizers and equipment) and adaptations of decade hits by Tears for Fears, New Order and Phil Collins. It is likely the first Broadway musical in history whose bloody climax takes place to Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square.”
“I think for a long time people made fun of the ’80s aesthetic, and it was something that was derided in Adam Sandler movies,” Mr. Sheik said. “But in fact a lot of really cool stuff happened in the ’80s. In some way, hopefully, ‘American Psycho’ does justice to the aesthetic of the era.”
In the theater world, the arrival of “American Psycho” on Broadway has been much anticipated (and long in coming, after a well-received run in London), but its ripples have been felt outside of it, too.
The men’s fashion e-tailer Mr Porter signed up as the men’s wardrobe partner for the Broadway production, and ’80s period piece or not, provided clothing from its stock to costume the cast and complement the vintage and custom ’80s suits — an easier task circa 2016 than may be initially imagined.
“There is a slight ’80s movement sort of sifting into fashion at the moment,” said Jeremy Langmead, Mr Porter’s brand and content director. “Double-breasted jackets are very fashionable at the moment,” Mr. Langmead said, and “even though the fit’s slimmer and the shoulder is less terrifying than in the ’80s, pinstripes are fashionable again.” The site is promoting its partnership with a special section online inviting you to “Dress Like Mr. Patrick Bateman,” the show’s titular psycho.
In women’s fashion, too, the ’80s are making a return. When, at Paris Fashion Week this March, shoulders began climbing up and out, it was an early warning sign, of sorts.
Hedi Slimane, among the most imitated designers in fashion at the moment, swerved dramatically from the scruffy nonchalance of his recent, best-selling Saint Laurent collections into a high-gloss, high-drama register that screamed 1980s. It would be his final collection for Saint Laurent; the house announced his departure a month later.
“I think for a long time people made fun of the ’80s aesthetic, and it was something that was derided in Adam Sandler movies,” Mr. Sheik said. “But in fact a lot of really cool stuff happened in the ’80s. In some way, hopefully, ‘American Psycho’ does justice to the aesthetic of the era.”
In the theater world, the arrival of “American Psycho” on Broadway has been much anticipated (and long in coming, after a well-received run in London), but its ripples have been felt outside of it, too.
The men’s fashion e-tailer Mr Porter signed up as the men’s wardrobe partner for the Broadway production, and ’80s period piece or not, provided clothing from its stock to costume the cast and complement the vintage and custom ’80s suits — an easier task circa 2016 than may be initially imagined.
“There is a slight ’80s movement sort of sifting into fashion at the moment,” said Jeremy Langmead, Mr Porter’s brand and content director. “Double-breasted jackets are very fashionable at the moment,” Mr. Langmead said, and “even though the fit’s slimmer and the shoulder is less terrifying than in the ’80s, pinstripes are fashionable again.” The site is promoting its partnership with a special section online inviting you to “Dress Like Mr. Patrick Bateman,” the show’s titular psycho.
In women’s fashion, too, the ’80s are making a return. When, at Paris Fashion Week this March, shoulders began climbing up and out, it was an early warning sign, of sorts.
Hedi Slimane, among the most imitated designers in fashion at the moment, swerved dramatically from the scruffy nonchalance of his recent, best-selling Saint Laurent collections into a high-gloss, high-drama register that screamed 1980s. It would be his final collection for Saint Laurent; the house announced his departure a month later.
She disputed the notion that there was one ’80s style. For her, she said, the joy of the ’80s was the freedom to dabble in many: rockabilly one day, new wave the next. Think of 1980s icons who piled on vintage and secondhand looks with reckless abandon, women like Cyndi Lauper (who, by the way, is still touring the nation, with Boy George in tow).
Echt 1980s boutique Giorgio Beverly Hills may be no more — nor its impresario, Fred Hayman, who died last week — but Barneys New York took a step back toward its 1980s moment. Its 17th Street women’s store, opened in 1986 connected to its formerly coed Seventh Avenue brother, was a destination for ’80s fashion plates looking for Alaïa, Montana and Gaultier, and the site of a charity fashion show and auction of denim jackets in 1986 to raise funds for AIDS research.
The Chelsea store closed in 1997, replaced by a Madison Avenue outpost. The Madison shop remains, but Barneys is back on Seventh Avenue. (A charity fashion show and auction of leather jackets, a callback to the 1986 original, was planned for the March opening, this time supporting White Columns gallery and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center; when the fashion show was scuppered because of space constraints, the auction was held online instead.)
Look around, and the spirit crops up everywhere. You can take your ’80s at the movies, whether sporting, as in Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” or swooning, as in “Once” director John Carney’s “Sing Street,” about would-be Dubliner rockers agog over Duran Duran.
You can take it on TV (or whatever streaming device has replaced your TV): on CNN, a seven-part documentary series, “The Eighties,” began on March 31; on Netflix, Winona Ryder (breakout star of “Beetlejuice” in 1988) stars in “Stranger Things,” a thriller billed as “a love letter to the ’80s classics that captivated a generation,” which will debut July 15.
In Mr. Trump, the 21st century may have its first ascendant politician who seems beamed in from the decade.
“Everything that drives his candidacy is in the ‘Art of the Deal,’” said Mike Berland of Berland Strategy & Analytics, who is a political strategist and pollster, referring to Mr. Trump’s 1987 book.
While still at the strategy firm Penn Schoen Berland, Mr. Berland advised Mr. Trump on various ’80s-vintage projects, including the fabled Trump Shuttle airline. “When he writes, ‘I never get too attached to one deal or one approach,’” Mr. Berland said, “and about the press’s hunger for a good story, the more controversial the better: Those inform his core beliefs and way he operates. That’s what I see in my social media conversation data — he has dominated coverage with so many ideas and controversial comments. Some good, some not as effective. That mentality, I think, comes from the ’80s, a little bit more of a selfish, self-involved era.”
Many now riding the ’80s wave have dim memories of the decade, if at all. According to Spotify, streams of 1980s music have tripled over the last three years (a trend that can’t be fully accounted for by Spotify’s own growth over that period). What’s more, the second-highest demographic of ’80s listeners on the platform are men from 18 to 24, according to the company — ’90s babies who missed the decade entirely. Even some in the highest demographic of listeners, men 25 to 34, would have missed the ’80s or enjoyed it in their infancy.
That was the case for Molly Prentiss, 32, whose debut novel, “Tuesday Nights in 1980,” a period piece set in the budding SoHo art world of the era, with fictional cameo appearances by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, had incited a bidding war among publishers and came out earlier this month to strong reviews.
“I was just a baby in the ’80s,” said Ms. Prentiss, whose book contains portions set in 1980. “I didn’t really know much about it apart from ‘Kids Incorporated.’”
She had not initially expected to focus on the decade. “It ended up being an ’80s book, even though it wasn’t intended to be,” she said. “It’s interesting that it’s sort of trending now, the late ’70s, early ’80s. I started the book seven years ago. I feel like it’s lucky. People are interested in that right now.”
Fenton Bailey, who, with his collaborator, Randy Barbato, directed “Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures,” which premiered this month on HBO, agreed.
Mr. Bailey and Mr. Barbato, who lived in Mapplethorpe’s New York of the 1980s, noticed the pervasive interest in this period while putting together their film, released in conjunction with the Lacma and Getty retrospectives. The Whitney ran a career-defining retrospective on Mr. Mapplethorpe in 1988, shortly before his death. And a show that included some of his most explicit images, which was planned for the Corcoran Gallery in Washington (and partly funded by an NEA grant), was canceled for fear of a congressional outcry and eventually held at the Washington Project for the Arts in 1989. Later that year, Senator Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to ban federal funding for art considered obscene, citing Mapplethorpe in particular.
“You could say, on the one hand, it’s nostalgia,” Mr. Bailey said in an interview. “What is nostalgia other than a sufficient amount of time has passed that you can forget the reality of what it was like and romanticize it?” (He cautioned against undue romance: His East Village, he said, “was shabby chic without the chic bit.”)
“I think there’s something more happening,” he said. “You really need a generation before you can look back and put something in its proper context.”
The generations have passed, though today’s generation, Google-weaned, can quickly make a fetish of whatever decade the moment happens to favor. The ’70s are never far from the popular imagination. The ’90s are enjoying their own durable revival, too. (The O. J. Simpson case is once again a water-cooler obsession.)
Then there are those classics that bridge the blurry ’80s and ’90s divide, like the treacle classic “Full House” (1987-95), reborn as “Fuller House,” or Hulk Hogan, the wrestler, enjoying a very strange third act.
But the ’80s arrived again (not for the first nor, surely, the last time) with their own special victory, given the low esteem in which they are sometimes held.
“It’s a decade that gets harsh press,” said Mr. Langmead, of Mr Porter, who looked back not entirely fondly on the styles of his own 1980s youth as a fashion student at Central Saint Martins in London.
Nevertheless, there’s a generation “growing up looking back at it, and they’ll think it’s very cool and retro,” he said. “They’ll be able to look on it with rosy-tinted spectacles, which will help it be picked up again.”
Written By MATTHEW SCHNEIER
Source: New York Times
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