The Big '80 s

Under the trailblazing, sky’s-the-limit leadership of editor Anthony T. Mazzola, Bazaar’s attitude toward the fashion and culture of the 1980s was simple: “More is more.”

- Stephen Mooallem

AS THE SAGE MAXIMALIST Diana Vreeland once remarked, “Too much good taste can be very boring.” The 1980s—in Harper’s Bazaar and in fashion— were not boring. By the dawn of the decade, Vreeland, then in her late 70s, was already ensconced at the Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was revisiting (and, in some cases, remaking) fashion history according to her own ecstatic worldview. But had she still been working as an editor, she no doubt would have greeted the explosion of good taste, bad taste, exuberant taste, and tastelessness that marked the Reagan years as a gift from the fashion gods. The ’80s have long been regarded as a period of unabashed, and at times irredeemable, egotism and excess. Everything in fashion got bigger and broader—the hair, the makeup, the silhouettes, the ideas—or was otherwise gilded, embellished, glossed, or giddily gaudy. In fact, the only thing about the decade that seemed to fly under the radar was the extraordinary creativity and innovation that fueled so much of the over-the-top fashion, which designers have only in recent years come to acknowledge and re-embrace.