Retro is in right now and it’s a long-living trend that has impacted everything from motorcycles to entire brands of car shows. Currently, it seems like everyone is addicted to the 1980s and the 1990s, but were they really what we are being sold?
If you’re like me, you picture the 1980s and 1990s as eras with bold colors, fun patterns, and vivid personalities. Even the retro products sold today want you to remember the more playful parts of the era. I’m an early ’90s baby, but I do vaguely remember the ’90s as being more “normal” than what I’d like to think today. Today, the Bishop wrote a Cold Start about how car ads gave you a glimpse into a country’s culture.
Then, Jack Trade dropped a bomb, presumably out of a Toyota Mirai:
The thing about the Ford ad is…that is how many people looked in the ’80s.
If you’ve only experienced the decade via movies and tv, you’re forgiven for thinking everyone was constantly wearing a riot of neon, your dad dressed like he was on Miami Vice, and your mom would be sporting a Madonna-style hairdo. Nope, not even close. It was a ton of earthtones, brown predominating, and the polyester-crazy of the ’70s hung on like a targa-top 911 in the curves.
Ranwhenparked agreed:
Yep, that looks like the guy who’d sell you a new kitchen floor at the local discount tile & carpet showroom, fill out the invoice in a fake wood paneled office heaped with papers, with a rattly air conditioner sticking out of the wall and a slight nicotine glaze on most surfaces, while the bored kids sat in the corner flipping through a book of carpet samples. That was life in the 80s
Thank you for breaking the world created by my rosy shades!
Speaking of the Bishop, he also figured out a way to repurpose a certain Nissan Leaf with a severely degraded battery. Turn it into a resort car! I regret that Username Loading… has a real groaner:
Cut my Leaf into pieces
This is my last resort
I’m so sorry…
Finally, David Tracy wrote about all of the cars you could buy for the price of an old Dodge Ram with a Cummins in it. I think we found a choice worse than buying a maximum depreciated Volkswagen, from Brandon Forbes:
Ooh that Aston is crazy cheap. I want it!
Justin Thiel comes in with a bucket of cold water:
I am sure there is no more financially dangerous statement in the world than this.
Have a great evening, everyone!
(Topshot: LBI Limited)
I just would like to add a little piece for the brownieness:). I was born in the late ’70s so I spent my most formidable years in the ’80s. It came down to hunt me recently when I finally decided it’s time to settle down have some kids (twins) and ruin my life with it permanently. So I went for the market to buy a family home and I ended up with my dream house from ’80s. It’s a fucking huge boxy house with the simplicity of a brick. I didn’t really know that’s my dream house before I went to see it. I bought it right away and I’m loving it dearly. But there is one big BUT. The color brown. It’s everywhere in the house. I’m fighting it since I bought the house, but man it’s hard. Sometimes I have the feeling that in the ’80s there wasn’t any other color just the different shades of brown. Brown tiles everywhere. We have 4 bathrooms and all of them were and one still have brown tiles. You sit down to take a dump and you feel you are sitting inside the product you just made. The hard flooring is brown of course but in a brown shade which I don’t think exist anymore. And it’s not just the interior the exterior is exactly the same brown everywhere… I mean I’m not against brown, but this was really insane… And still is.
The Olan Mills Portrait church fit as depicted in that ford ad was not exactly real life all the time though. There was a lot of hot pink mr zoggs sex wax shirts and neon green oakley razor blades also. The neon stuff tended to straddle the decade starting around 86 and carrying through into the early nineties.
au contraire..
Kenny Souza in 1990, look designed in the 80s..
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/12-may93-1000-0-1484275026.jpg?resize=1200:*
For the most part, the pop culture timing we’re use to is more applicable to cities and places that are doing well. From the 80’s onward, we’re talking the west coast, maybe a sunbelt city or two, NYC, etc.
As a kid in the 90’s but growing up in Upstate NY, we were always seemingly 3-5 years behind. I think that goes for much of the rural northeast, the midwest, and other places that a) have for the most part only experienced economic decline or at best, stasis since the 70’s, or b) have plain folks identities that seem to only go through slight changes over the years. Really not much has changed, eye popping design, risky fashion choices and cutting edge music tends to be developed in culturally relevant cities, not Dayton, OH. Over a period of time, watered down versions of those things trickle down out into the burbs.
“Decades” are like this, what everyone thinks was the 60s was really the 70’s (the summer of love kicking off “hippies” was 1967), and so on, so the style everyone assumes was the 80’s was really late 80s-90s. Most of the 80s were really pretty boring, stylistically. The music of course was perfect.
I don’t like Porsche. Smelt like WW2.
I’m going to dig out my glacier glasses and roll a bone of Gainesville Green.
Naah, you want a Zima and your Jams shorts. F–k, I loved my Jams shorts….
Your ’80s may differ. Mine were in S. Florida, where weekly you could find a Fiat 124 with a broken rubber band, pay $75 for it and another $75 in parts would fix it. Top down bliss.
I was in High School smack dab in the middle of the 1980’s. Remember in Billy Madison when he shows up to high school in a Trans Am with a jean jacket and a Billy Squier T shirt? That was perfect 1982.
But we must remember the words of Ricky Gervais, when he was shown a picture of himself circa 1982, some 30 years later. The “New Romantics” look was very hot. They asked him “Aren’t you embarrassed about how you looked then?”
He said “No, that was the style. I’m embarrassed about how I look today…”
I was very little, but I remember wood paneling and lots of brown. LOTS of brown.
Then again, the last time I did Radwood was an excuse to embrace the mallgoth, so to say I’m a little over a lot of the neon-pastel-nostalgia-wonderland is, well, yeah. We need more broughams at that show, too. It’s a good excuse to bring out the Puffalump, but good grief, spectator tickets were almost as much as entering a car at COTA. Might pass next year and tell people to meet me at Harris Hill or whatever.
If you weren’t on a Nickelodeon set, you mostly missed a lot of brown and then later, dusty pastels and florals. Lots of geese and animal-themed kitchens in general, too. Mom went with cows, but there were many ’90s country blue geese things. Heck, I still have goose towels in the kitchen and perhaps the one true Actual Radwood Era final boss, a brown plastic mug with Canada gooses* on it.
(*the actual term as per Letterkenny)
We somehow missed the barnyard animal-themed kitchen accessories, but my parents did decide that a great cover for the avocado green linoleum in the kitchen would be vinyl with a faux tile print. And since this was the early ’90s, the faux tile was accented with little ribbon shapes in that ’90s country rose color.
Faux tile vinyl. Absolutely *choice* in the early ’90s.
“Grout is so hard!” – everyone I curse now that I love vintage tile. :'(
Haha, oh yeah. Ribbons, lace, frills. All that Laura Ashley stuff. Alternately, there was the burgundy/forest green/navy blue trope for Serious Types Making a Serious Room. Can’t have a lawyer’s office without some couch in one of those colors, or perhaps striped or plaid-ed with all three.
Oh, and don’t forget all the brass ‘n’ glass fixtures. Chandeliers, doorknobs, bathroom faucets, all of it. I have extremely mixed feelings whenever “Fixer Upper” does a ’90s house since the one new house we bought (which my parents were like, we’re never doing that again since the decision paralysis split between two people is maddening) was a ’92 build in the Waco ‘burbs. You’re undoing ACTUAL NOSTALGIA (although honestly, those houses weren’t awful in the end, either).
I had somehow disconnected the Serious Room stuff from the ’90s – mainly because I was very guilty of using forest green/dark wood furniture in The Sims – but yeah, that was definitely a thing. There was also a ‘rustic’ trend in the late ’90s that was sometimes paired with this (think lamps with wrought iron bases, sometimes in the shape of something whimsical like an old bike); I still have a very small table lamp from that era.
Being a kid that played Dungeons and Dragons listened to heavy metal and dressed grunge 10 years before it was cool. The 1980s satanic panic was a real trip.
Still think it funny that our ‘satan music’ is now background music at the grocery store.
The day I hear Meshuggah at the grocery store is the day I die.
’80s Satanic Panic has to be an existing band name.
I was a preteen to ending my teen years in the 1980s they were so horrid that I do every thing I can to forget them. As a poor chubby nerd outcast in the 1980s, I hated the dress, music, fads, cars, and the Reagan years. The only fond memories are the 5 years I worked in a mall toy store. Living during peak “Shopping Mall” was something.
This is me with the late-’00s. My college years were miserable and any attempt to rehab the recession era should never be attempted. There’s nothing worthy of revival. Leave it in the bin.
I always cringe a bit when I see how the 80’s are portrayed in post-80’s culture. As many have said, the first part of the decade was awash in muted earth tones, which properly reflected the reality of the times – things weren’t great. Much of the country and world at large were locked in recession, intrest rates were sky high, factories were closing, people were losing jobs, and the spectre of instantaneous death via mutually assured destruction was always present. I entered high school in 1982, and my friends and I were fairly convinced that we wouldn’t live to see graduation. Things started to turn a bit in 1984 when people started to feel better, almost in spite of everything.
Of all the recent 80’s themed TV/movies, I think that the FX series “The Americans” got it as close to real as I remember it. Lots of the little details that escape most period productions were not missed in this show. If one wants to see how that decade actually looked and felt, that series is a pretty good place.
“my friends and I were fairly convinced that we wouldn’t live to see graduation.”
And here we are 40 years later wondering why we didn’t plan better for our futures. I still can’t believe I survived the 80’s and early 90’s unscathed.
I do remember trying to show up at school dressed like Buckaroo Banzai and standing out like a sore thumb. It was all jeans and polo shirts but there I was in my yellow shirt and skinny red tie…
Damn, TIL that I had a more trendy/stereotypical high school experience in San Antonio than others. I graduated in ’85 and I was essentially a walking-talking ad for Chess King and Jeans West. I had a red pair and black pair of parachute pants that zipped off into shorts and would mix-n-match the legs. Despite the neat 100 deg temps at the beginning of the school year, we were not allowed to wear shorts, so I would wear those pants with one leg removed. Only 1 teacher demanded I put the leg back on. Exceptionally stupid rule since there was no minimum length for skirts and lots of girls wore the trendy mini-skirts and sweater dresses that barely covered their ass(ets). And for the girls that wore jeans, the butt-hugging Jordaches were the jeans of choice. Fond memories indeed!
While the Cold War spectre was real, we had a much more “Party like it’s 1999!” attitude, and readily looked at the yuppie model as the way forward.
I would argue that Stranger Things gets the aesthetic pretty close, minus the evil monsters. Mostly.
The Americans is on Hulu now. Highly recommend it.
A very accurate take, from my position as someone who graduated from high school in 1985.
Another interesting facet is how young people were often acutely aware of the looming threat of nuclear war, and yet so many adults just looked the other way — at least in appearance. My theory is that the eldest had experienced WWII and viewed it as “just another war” combined with the “duck and cover” propaganda of the 50’s that reinforced the silly idea that it was survivable. And younger adults, like teenagers’ parents, had grown up with just the “duck and cover” propaganda and still had the survivability myth stuck in their consciousness.
For teens and young adults in college in the mid- to late 80’s, the awareness and existential dread was far more real. Those of us who paid attention in science class could understand the ugly reality of nuclear warfare. It led to various ways to lash out against it or shut it away like unwanted intrusive thoughts — we had the cultural spectrum of punk, carefree pop culture, to button-down Young Republicans and yuppie-wannabees, and across it all “partying like it’s 1999” because who knew if or when the bombs would drop.
And aside from all that, technology’s advancement had picked up the pace abruptly. First, early “home computers” with limited capability, and onward to the dawn of “real” PCs. Analog Walkman cassette players, boomboxes, then CD players and the digital format going mainstream. Huge technological leaps in the background that would lead to the Internet in the 90s. Even out beloved cars were transitioning from the demise of 1960s-based engineering languishing in the Malaise Era into more modern platforms beginning to leverage electronic and microprocessor-based fuel injection, stereo systems more sophisticated than just a radio and a couple of 6×9’s in the back. And at home, our phones were becoming un-tethered with cordless models (with big telescoping walkie-talkie style antennas…), answering machines (or early voicemail form the phone company) to liberate us from waiting for calls, and pagers which could signal us anywhere. Instant cameras were mainstream, and traditional film cameras with electronic exposure control were revolutionizing how photography documented our lives. The Space Race was behind us, but technology was changing the world year-over-year. Capitalism and tech hand-in-hand were either delivering a bright future or the onset of a dark dystopia — take your pick. (Assuming the US and USSR didn’t launch the ICBMs first…)
The times were energetic, exhausting, naïvely optimistic and darky pessimistic all at once.
I was in the punk contingent then, protesting at those who didn’t or wouldn’t see the warning signs or who chose profit and exploitation over doing good with the advances in science and technology. I still cherish and nurture my black punk heart, and now I’m old, occasionally cranky and yell at clouds because so many people both older and younger than myself seem to have completely forgotten or ignored the lessons that could have been learned from that era.
Same here – punk in high school (London Ontario had a pretty active scene) and member of the anti-nuclear club, ‘Students United for Nuclear Sanity’. The biggest thing we did (lots of meetings and ideas, little actual action) was rent a school bus to go to a demonstration in Toronto, which was maybe an hour of marching and then raiding the seedy head shops of 1980s Yonge Street for Crass and Bauhaus t-shirts.
I kind of feel like pessimism is back in a big way lately, especially when it comes to climate change and gun violence. One is just something that’s like, welp, we’re cookin’ to death and no one in power is addressing it enough. The other, oof. Columbine happened when I was in junior high? I think? and while those incidents stayed thankfully rare for my generation, we’ve had a string of similar incidents that are really driving home why the “hide, be quiet and hope for the best” drills are just…normalized now. There’s no longer that sense of distance that we had when I was in school of “this is a rare thing and it probably won’t happen here.” Plus, it’s all just really bleak, especially when “hoping for the best” can sometimes, well, Uvalde. It’s the new duck and cover, I guess. Hey, you might get obliterated, but you’ll get obliterated hiding under a desk!
Major powers armed to the teeth with nukes getting back into international spats isn’t great, either. I’m kind of with The Teens who are like, yolo. Go do the interesting stuff now because who can even know about the future anymore.
Since this is a car site, I felt obliged to post this link to all the cars used “The Americans”. https://www.imcdb.org/m2149175.html
Same thing when we see pop culture stuff from the 50s. Hollywood would like us to think it was all poodle skirts, cool cars, and time travel shenanigans, but when I look at pictures of my parents from back then, it looks more like a the 1940s in A Christmas Story.
My Mom grew up in 50s, says it sucked. She grew up in very small rural town in midwest which she fled when graduated HS.
I actually gasped the other day when I saw a promotional photo in one of my old-house fan groups with someone in a poodle skirt. That is so rare in period photos or illustrations!
If you really want a taste of years past try awkward family photos:
https://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/
(It’s not a good taste.)
It’s easy to mix up pop culture 80’s aesthetics with the 80’s aesthetics that most people actually had. You did get to see some wild contrasts though, like when your office worker dad wearing 4 different shades of brown would hop into his GM sedan with an eye-searingly bright red interior.
I had hair like that kid until 6th grade (1985/86); with my new shorter hair I can remember the wind whistling up my ear canals.
Mom had a Plymouth Horizon, next to that a Foxbody LTD like one of my uncles had was disappointing in the space-utilization department.
Here’s the problem with cultural decades – they don’t follow the calendar.
The 70’s (disco) were still going strong into the calendar 80’s. Culturally, the 70’s probably ended with AIDS. When AIDS was finally acknowledged as a communicable disease that could happen to straight white people, it threw a bucket of cold water on the free love drug party.
I’d say the 80’s probably ended with gangster rap (Snoop Dogg), but the slide away from the 80’s esthetic started a few years earlier with grunge. BTW, every urban area was f’n dangerous when crack was around.
I feel like a lot of trends that are blamed on the 80’s were more a product of the early 90’s, especially the sweaters with triangles and the like. I have no idea why we loved sweaters. I wore them then. I have not worn or considered wearing one since.
Similarly, I’ve always said that the 60s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, sort of how nobody remembers the Ford administration because they were too busy having sex.
Seriously. I’d agree. I don’t think the 70’s started until we were out of Vietnam.
You’re reminding me of when Snoop’s first video came out on MTV and my parents lost their everloving SHIT over it (“that’s not real music! this is just noise!”). I was around 8 and thought it was amazingly cool when Snoop turned into a Doberman. Also we were poor and my wardrobe was mostly my older brother’s hand-me-downs (I am a girl, so even less cool than it sounds!). I was pumped to see the oversized clothes that were in the grunge and early hip hop trends.
Still traumatized by the time a girl recognized her donated jeans on my skinny male 7th grade ass….
(⊙ˍ⊙)
Congrats on surviving that character-building moment.
That was rude. I recognized a former winter jacket of mine being worn by a schoolmate, but just kept my mouth shut.
*does Carlton dance*
^^^ 1990s rebel
As a kid in the 90s and teen in the aughts we made fun of the 80s MERCILESSLY. So it’s funny to me to see all the heavy nostalgia now, but also good to see the good stuff we failed to appreciate at the time getting its due. I coulda had any number of great 80-90s gems as my first car (almost all dirt cheap then) but no, I had to have a death trap of a ‘67 Impala SS because that was a COOL decade, haha. High School us’ are dumb.
My parents were so remarkably stuck in the 60’s, that by the time I went to college in the 90’s, I had only just begun to discover the 80’s. The current nostalgia makes me realize I’m still next to clueless about the 70’s.
Cocaine. You are now caught up.
Very cheap cocaine
80’s university; too little sleep, too much beer, liquior and substances. Bad food, questionable lifestyle and romance decisions, crappy old cars and motorcycles. Then feedum, real job paying real money, more of the first half of the decade in terms of the rest; just slightly higher quality bc of muney. Don’t recall much of the tv, music or other distractions of real life. Did like the alternative Seattle scene music.
Many people were derailed by a university minor in Recreational Pharmaceuticals back in the day.
Congrats Jack Trade! I was thinking along at least similar lines when I read his comment after seeing that add. In fact, those kids in the add could easily have been my sister and I during that time. Well, except my mom would never have let me get away with wearing my hair in that ridiculously long hippy-length past the ears fashion. Also, my dad was more of a plaid button-up type of guy.
My uncle on the other hand looked the part. He may have even had that exact watch. No decadent LTD for him though, he was a 4-speed 4-banger Fairmont-man through-and-through.
The 80’s… if you weren’t there, you didn’t miss much.
My dad too. I did try to fight the good fight back then though – I got into an argument with my parents once about my desire for a pastel pink or purple shirt b/c Crockett. Hell no I was told.
Later than year, I got an A in a class (can’t even remember which now) and my father was so pleased with me – I wasn’t a great student – that he snuck out and bought me one. My mom was kinda upset at the breakdown in parental solidarity, but happy that I was maybe making something of myself.
Classic 80’s parenting concerns. What threat of global thermonuclear war? We have greater evils to confront – you know, pastels and devil-music.
The funny thing is, my wife is the same age as me. Apparently she had no knowledge of the constant threat of nuclear war. I assume her 80’s were much different than mine (I didn’t meet her until the 90’s).
That’s kind of amazing. No War Games? No The Day After? Sounds like a whole other timeline.
Even worse. Didn’t even understand the context of Rocky IV.
My wife had no idea about velvet Elvis paintings. Such a sheltered life!
Does she at least know about velvet clown paintings? Has she ever seen dogs playing poker?
Some people just ain’t cultured.
I never saw They Day After, but some of my friends did. They were scarred from the experience.
Red Dawn!
WOLVERINES!
Woohoo! My first COTD! Even if it was more for the reply to my comment than my actual comment, I’ll still take it
Congrats man, but, aren’t you like a contributor?
Shh haha yeah but at most once a week freelance, I’m not an employee or anything
If anyone wants to know what the True ’80s looked like watch the movie No Retreat, No Surrender, and revel in the wood paneling, the symphony of brown, and the range of shirts that didn’t quite fit right.
For me the 80s was more like Repo man, but with fewer alien bodies.
So many browns.
A basement with wood paneling and a bar was the coolest place in town.
A family friend actually had a bar and restaurant booths they had bought from a closing pizza joint in the basement. I’m still tempted to do that in my dining room.