Design History class....1980's

In the design history class we had the other day, we watched a documentry about the 1980's- the pop culture, the media, new romantics, sex, drugs, sexuality, singers etc It was kind of like a quick overview of the 80's.

I found the documentry interesting. I found it quite fascinating that in the 80's gay men would dress in lumber jack shirts with chunky boots (to come across as butch) for a night on the town, and nowadays the stereotypical dress code for lesbians is very much the same as this- checkered shirt, with junky boots.

Two of the main people that stood out to me from the documentry is Boy George and Annie Lennox for there brash gender roles they had at the time. Boy George was very feminine, wether he was for a specific reason is unsure, and yet on the other hand Annie lennox for a certain performace dressed as Elvis- as a sort of way of saying fuck stereotypes. In the 80's androgonoy was literally skin deep: something I'm quite fond of.

The idea of sex was highly focused. It seems as though sex was a recurrent theme in the 80's until the back end of the 80's when 'a new disease, known as AIDS crept upon Britain' and scared the jeeebies out of everyone. During the time when AIDS were on every news channel and was apparent on every newspaper, women started to become more stronger in socitey: led by Madonna, of course, in showing how powerful women are and as Madonna says in a clip we saw on the footage


- 'Pussy rules the world'

New york and Workwear- my two favourite things

My loyal readers will now know that I don't really like styling females very girly and pretty, that's just not my style, I like to give them a different sense of standing and a sense of being as you have probably already read in one of my past posts, so when I came across an article on a exhibiton where curators,critics and designers have the chance to mix the genders by dissecting imagery and symbols of certain dress codes that shape the business world, basically to help to inspire you to resist authority I read on.

I love the playfullness and abruptness of the 'no messing' attitude by simply placing imagery on top of imagery, by adding layers (literally and metophorically) and mixing genders ever so directally as John Stezaker has in Betrayal VIII.

I am so jealous that I won't make the exhibition, not because of some other glamourous prior engagement but for the very boring reason of not having the amazing opportunity of living in New York, but hay hoo, I guess I can catch it over the net.....boohhoooo :(