webofevil | (no subject)

This is the first retro fashion year I have lived through where I was conscious enough the first time around of the fashion currently being aped. I find I can’t view it with affection; in fact it’s creeping me out. Going into Top Man now, it turns out, is like walking into the Virgin Megastore when I was 14, and not in a good way. The colours and designs are just too familiar. As

flaneurette put it, “They haven’t run with it”, and that’s exactly what they haven’t done. It’s as if warehouses full of this gear have sat silent for 20 years, waiting for the moment the long-touted 80s revival would finally take off. Except that, Top Man’s quality control being what it is, the net effect is of a sci-fi plot involving sinister aliens trying to fool kidnapped Earthlings that they are still on their home planet by surrounding them with unconvincing knock-offs of ephemera familiar from home. Consequently the current 1980s wave doesn’t make me feel old, just somehow... unsettled.