1980s Power Dressing

FIT sums up 1980s fashion as "bigger is better": bold colours, exaggerated shapes, and clothes meant to be noticed. Two very different ideas dominated women's fashion, and both were about confidence. Power dressing used broad, padded shoulders and sharp tailoring borrowed from menswear, at a time when more women were entering management and professional careers. Body-conscious dressing used stretch fabrics like Lycra to follow the body closely, celebrating a fit, toned figure in the decade of aerobics. A third current, from Japan, rejected both.

Power dressing

The power suit was a tailored jacket with wide, padded shoulders, often double-breasted, worn with a knee-length skirt or trousers. The jacket's big shoulders made the hips look narrower and gave the wearer a strong, upright silhouette, borrowing the authority of a man's suit. Shoulder pads appeared in almost everything: jackets, dresses, blouses, knitwear, even T-shirts, sometimes held in with snaps or hook-and-loop tape so they could be moved from garment to garment.

The look ran from conservative business suits in navy and pinstripe to the extreme, sculpted shoulders of designers such as Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, sometimes combined with nipped waists and peplums. Karl Lagerfeld, hired at Chanel in 1983, revitalised the house's classic suits, and television dramas showed big-shouldered glamour to millions of viewers every week.

Body-conscious dressing

Running alongside the suits, and working in the opposite way, were clothes that shaped to the body instead of imposing a shape on it. FIT puts it this way: "Women's bodies were now shaping the clothes, rather than clothes shaping the body." Azzedine Alaïa's close-fitting dresses in stretch knits are the defining example, and Donna Karan built a wardrobe for working women around easy, stretch jersey pieces. The fitness boom put leotards, leggings, leg warmers and sweatshirts into everyday wardrobes. All of it relied on Lycra (spandex) blended into knits. See Knit Fabrics.

Deconstruction from Japan

Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) and Yohji Yamamoto showed in Paris in the early 1980s with clothes that questioned Western ideas of fit and finish: loose, asymmetric, mostly black, with raw edges, holes and unexpected layering. They had a lasting influence on fashion design and on the minimalism of the 1990s.

Other 1980s looks

Sportswear and tracksuits, preppy collegiate styles, acid-wash denim, goth (which grew out of punk), and hip-hop style, with tracksuits, branded sneakers and gold jewellery, all developed during the decade. Pop stars such as Madonna had a huge influence on young people's clothing.

Building a 1980s padded-shoulder jacket

A power jacket is built with tailoring methods, scaled up:

1. Shoulder pads. Use set-in sleeve pads (crescent-shaped, firm edge at the armhole) for a sharp, square shoulder, or raglan pads (rounded over the shoulder) for raglan and dolman sleeves. 1980s pads were thick, often 3/4"-1" (2-2.5 cm) or more.
2. Adjust the pattern for the pad. A shoulder pad raises the shoulder, so the shoulder seam and sleeve cap must be raised by about the pad's thickness. Vintage 1980s patterns already allow for pads. Modern patterns may not.
3. Interface firmly. Fuse a medium-weight interfacing to the jacket fronts, facings, collar and upper back. Add a back stay, and a sleeve head (a strip of wadding or bias wool along the top of the sleeve cap) so the sleeve rolls smoothly over the pad. See Fusible Interfacing.
4. Position the pad so it extends about 1/2" (1.3 cm) beyond the shoulder seam into the sleeve cap, and hand-tack it to the seam allowances at the shoulder and armhole.
5. Press and shape with steam, especially at the shoulder and lapel, so the structure looks crisp. See Sleeve.
6. Line the jacket to finish it and help it slide over a blouse.

Choose suiting fabrics with body: wool gabardine, wool crepe, flannel, and polyester or viscose suiting.

Sewing a body-con dress

A stretch body-con dress needs almost no internal structure, because the fabric does the fitting. Choose a firm knit with good recovery and some spandex (ponte, power mesh, heavy jersey). Fit closely, using the stretch for negative ease, sew with a stretch stitch or overlocker, and stabilise the shoulders. The precision moves from cutting and darts to choosing the right stretch.

If you only make one 1980s piece, the padded-shoulder jacket teaches the most, because it uses the whole vocabulary of tailoring, turned up for effect.