Did the Eighties ever end?

By Peter York

The theatrical costumier Charles H. Fox closed its hire business in central London in 1980 after a 102-year run. All sorts of treasures—from the heyday of Gainsborough Pictures in the 1950s, stretching back to Victorian theatre in the 1860s—were sold off at absurdly low prices. Assorted art students and squat-sharers and fabulous nobodies queued around the block to buy up Fox’s stock. Among them were a crop of DJs and other creatures of the night from Billy’s and Blitz in Covent Garden—Boy George and his (male) chum Marilyn, Steve Strange, Rusty Egan. Their make-believe pirates, gypsies and dandy highwaymen filled the clubs, then music videos, and finally the charts. They went from being extras for David Bowie’s "Ashes to Ashes" shoot to being pop stars themselves, infecting the charts and the high streets of the Western world. Fans of pivotal moments could do worse than this: post-punks raiding a Victorian dressing-up box and inaugurating the Style Decade.

A generation later, the political and economic assumptions of the Thatcher-Reagan era are facing serious challenges after years of recession. But there’s a legacy of the 1980s that won’t go away so easily, starting with that basic change—most marked in Britain—that legitimised style itself, brought it from the fringes to the fore, produced a great economic rhetoric for the admen, design companies and video directors who claimed they were Adding Value to the nation, and seeded a crop of styles and stances that have been amazingly persistent.