Fabulous Fashion through the ages

From bell-bottoms to Juicy Couture, Scott Harris navigates four decades of fashion

When you come to university, it’s clear to most people that it’s a pretty diverse and liberal place – societies, sports, international student body. In terms of fashion, students feel they can dress however they like (and rightly so!) in a bid to express themselves in ways their high school never allowed. Fashion sense becomes a personal thing, a way to communicate individuality and independence. Look under the desk in a seminar and you’ll notice a variety of creepers, trainers, flip-flops. Celebrate, for the days of uniformity and homogeny are behind us! But you can forget about that as I wade my way through the last forty years of fashion, making as many sweeping generalisations as possible.

70s

‘70s fashion is undergoing a revival at the moment, with platform shoes becoming once again part of everyday gear, along with tortoise-shell glasses, eccentric knitwear and paisley shirts. Anyone who’s seen That ‘70s Show will have a solid stereotypical view of what the ‘70s looked like – and I say embrace the stereotype! It’s serving as inspiration for new trends and styles. Having said that, flares and bell-bottoms can stay in the past where they belong; nobody needs to see that. The decade also saw the rise of denim jeans – little did they know that twenty years down the line “double denim” would become a thing courtesy of JT and ‘N Sync. And that’s why the ‘70s were great.

80s
Leg warmers? Sweat bands? No, thank you. Since when did we look to exercise videos for support when it comes to fashion? Come on, fashionistas of ‘80s, sort it out. The casual look of the ‘70s and the legacy of Fame were shortly overshadowed in the UK in the wake of Punk, as obscure fashion statements became more and more popular. Boy George and the Culture Club is the obvious example of 80s experimental fashion. But did people really wear that stuff? It quickly became cliché, and young people moved on – to shoulder pads! Dynasty actresses and Princess Diana give good examples of “the career woman”, whatever that means, and aspects of this fashion are starting to show through in recent styles. Just check out Rihanna or Miley Cyrus’s Instagram.

90s
Considering I like to think of the ‘90s as “mine”, I know virtually nothing about what people wore. I spent most of the decade wearing blue dungarees with a red car on the front. Didn’t everyone? Denim was once again taking the world by storm. GAP began branding itself as “staple” clothing – no one’s wardrobe was complete until it contained at least seven pairs of jeans, a denim jacket and numerous denim shirts (all in different washes, of course). Apart from this, no single trend really tied the ‘90s together. Look at the Spice Girls: even on stage they didn’t co-ordinate their dress sense, what with Scary’s obsession with leopard print.

00s
Abercrombie and Fitch. Superdry. Von Dutch. Jack Wills. Tiny hand bags. Massive hand bags. UGG. Juicy Couture. In the ‘00s, if it had a logo, you bought it. And in a fortnight, when it was no longer trendy, it was out with the old and in with the new. No one really knows how to define the general style of the ‘00s, and that’s because even at the time no one knew what was cool. Now it seems we’ve outgrown the constant need to cover ourselves with brands. With the growing popularity of ‘thrift-shopping’ and the resuscitation of vintage styles, we’ve almost decided to take the best bits of the last 40 years’ worth of fashion and created a hybrid sense of style. And I’m pretty happy with that, aren’t you?