The early 1980s continued a trend begun in the late 1970s toward a resurgence of interest in the ladies' evening wear styles of the early 1940s, with
peplums,
batwing sleeves and other design elements of the times reinterpreted for a new market. The shoulder pad helped define the silhouette and continued to be made in the cut foam versions introduced in the fall 1978 collections, especially in well-cut suits reminiscent of the World War II era. These styles had initially been resisted by the public at their 1978 introduction, but designers continued to present exaggerated shoulder pads into the eighties so that they saturated the market and women did come to adopt them, with everyone from television celebrities to politicians wearing them. For example, British Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher was internationally noted for her adoption of these fashions as they more and more became the norm. Before too long, these masculinized shapes were adopted by women seeking success in the corporate world, women who in the mid-seventies had worn sensibly proportioned blazers for the same purpose, and exaggerated shoulder pads later became seen as a symbol of women's attempts to smash the
glass ceiling, a mission that was aided by their notable appearance in the US TV series
Dynasty, whose stars' broad-shouldered,
Valentino-inspired outfits were designed by
Nolan Miller. As the decade wore on, exaggerated shoulder pads became the defining fashion statement of the era, known as
power dressing (a term that had previously been applied to the more sensibly proportioned business blazers of the mid-seventies) and bestowing the perception of status and position onto those who wore them. Some of the exaggerated shoulder pad sizes from the fall 1978 introduction of the trend became accepted and even common among the public by the mid-eighties. Every garment from the
brassiere upwards would come with its own set of shoulder pads, with women frequently layering one shoulder-padded garment atop another, a trend launched by designers in 1978. To prevent excessive shoulder padding,
velcro was sewn onto the pads so that the wearer could choose how many sets to wear. The ability to remove shoulder pads also helped prevent deforming the pads in the wash, but discomfort could result if the pad wasn't attached securely to the velcro strip and the rough side scratched the skin. Other problems experienced by women as shoulder pads became widespread included slipping and displacement of the pads in oversized garments and interference with purse straps. Prominent designers of big shoulders who had name recognition with the public during this period included
Norma Kamali,
Emanuel Ungaro, and
Donna Karan. Kamali was one of a number of designers who, instead of just reviving highly tailored 1940s-style suits, added large shoulder pads to more contemporary sportswear styles, achieving great fame and influence in 1980 by showing sweatshirt-fabric versions of the flounced, hip-yoked, mini-length skirts she had introduced in 1979 (called rah-rah skirts in the UK) and presenting them with hugely shoulder-padded tops in the same material, the pads removable via velcro. Kamali was the first designer to make prominent use of velcro-fastened shoulder pads. Some made the plausible claim that the worldwide success of this collection is what finally made shoulder pads acceptable to the public after two or three years of designers promoting them. In 1984, she made a video showcasing her fall collection that included a song about shoulder pads, featuring lines like, "She's got big shoulder pads for men to cry on."
Ungaro became perhaps the most commercially successful of the Paris designers of the period by maximizing the use of seductive-looking shirring, ruching, and draping in large-shouldered dresses and suits, part of a reintroduced
Schiaparelli-era trend of Edwardian revival.
Donna Karan, who had achieved fame in the 1970s as one of the designers behind the
Anne Klein label, opened her own house in the mid-eighties, specializing in versatile separates for working women as she had in the seventies, but with eighties-style big shoulder pads and more formal glamor added to conform to the times. Though distracting to the eye today, exaggerated shoulder pads were so normal during the eighties that the huge shoulders of Karan, Ungaro, and others were often not even commented on by fashion writers. Throughout the Fall 1978-through-1980s big-shoulder-pads period, designers and fashion writers often said that the current year's shoulders were not as big as the previous year's. Often, means besides or in addition to shoulder pads were used to enlarge the shoulder, including puff-top sleeves, tucks and pleats, shoulder flanges, and stiffened ruffles. Yet, pronounced shoulder padding continued in high fashion through the mid-eighties. The most consistent in showing particularly huge ones was probably
Claude Montana, who declared in 1985, "Shoulders forever!" Nicknamed "King of the Shoulder Pad," Montana's silhouette designs were credited for defining the 1980s power-dressing era. There were some designers who never really took them up, particularly Japanese designers like
Kenzo and
Issey Miyake, but by and large, most put them in everything, with almost all creating their own versions of the heavily structured, prominently shoulder-padded eighties suit jacket, even normally independent designers like
Mary McFadden,
Jean Muir,
André Courrèges, and
Giorgio di Sant'Angelo. Eighties designers even incorporated big shoulder pads when they were doing revival styles from earlier, non-shoulder-padded eras like the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, a version of the 1950s chemise dress was widely shown by designers from the 1978 inception of the big-shoulder era into the eighties, but with shoulder pads instead of authentic 1950s sloped shoulders. Similarly, when
Thierry Mugler did sixties-revival styles in 1985, they included his characteristic enormous shoulder pads. Even sixties-revivalist
Stephen Sprouse showed his period-perfect shift and trapeze minidresses in the eighties with broad-shouldered jackets and topcoats and produced his own versions of the shoulder-padded undergarments popular in the mid-eighties. Designers producing more eighties-looking
minidresses added shoulder pads because they felt that prominent shoulders helped balance out the increased expanse of leg. During a brief general designer return to a sort of mid-seventies style of long
dirndl skirts and shawls for Fall 1981, most shoulders remained broad and padded, very unlike the seventies. All of this had an effect on the public, so that by the end of the era, some mass-market shoulder pads were the size of dinner plates and people were no longer shocked by them as they had been at their 1978 introduction. During the mid-eighties, though, there were clear signs of a move away from big shoulder pads among several prominent designers, with
Vivienne Westwood introducing her famous 1985-86 mini-crini specifically to, as she put it, "kill this big shoulder."
Christian Lacroix's celebrated mini-pouf skirt collections of 1986-87 were dominated by sloping, fichu shoulders, and even
Karl Lagerfeld, who had been an early leader in the 1978 move to huge shoulders, for 1986 took pads from the shoulders and placed them visibly on the outside of the hips. Two years later, he would proclaim that shoulders would now be "tiny."
Yves Saint Laurent had initiated the eighties big-shoulder trend in January 1978 and had been a shoulder-pad stalwart throughout the intervening years, but in 1988 even his shoulders, while still padded, had been noticeably narrowed. The two designers most noted for showing huge shoulders at the start of the era,
Thierry Mugler and
Claude Montana, brought their shoulders down in size somewhat mid-decade, with Montana giving up big shoulders entirely by 1988, when he began showing collections with completely natural shoulders.
Pierre Cardin's shoulders had rivaled Claude Montana's in size since 1978, but he too began removing shoulder apparatus in the mid-eighties. Avant-garde designers like
Adeline André and Marc Audibet had long shown sloped shoulders with no pads, as had
Romeo Gigli, who was hailed as the most prophetic designer of the end of the eighties. He showed almost exclusively natural, sloping shoulders, even on tailored jackets. This direction among designers was clear enough that in
The Washington Post's New Year in/out list for 1989, "Shoulder pads" were listed as out and "Shoulders" were listed as in. The public and retailers, though, had embraced shoulder pads wholeheartedly by the end of the decade, feeling that they filled out their form and gave clothes a more saleable "hanger appeal," quite a change from the public's rejection of these styles when designers first introduced them in 1978. Shoulder pad manufacturers were now flourishing, with literally millions of pads produced every week. Many women seemed reluctant to give up big shoulder pads as designers began sending new signals in the late eighties. Prominent shoulder pads would not completely disappear until into the nineties.
Shoulder pads in 1980s menswear In menswear, the exaggerated shoulder pads that had been introduced into high-fashion clothing in 1979 would continue to various degrees throughout the eighties, even becoming mainstream, with many everyday business suits having more pronounced shoulders than had usually been worn in the seventies. High-fashion shoulder pad shapes would vary with the whims of designers, a sharp-edged pad preferred one season, a more rounded pad preferred another. Part of what drove these styles was the increased proliferation of serious working out in the eighties after widespread fitness and health pursuits had emerged in the seventies. Near-bodybuilder physiques became normal sights starting in the eighties for everyday people, both on the streets and in advertising, and jacket shapes seemed to echo this, sometimes by padding the shoulders and shaping the cut even more to a V-shape, other times by leaving out or reducing the pads to allow the newly built-up wearer's own body to give the jacket shape. By the end of the eighties, there was a fad for often brightly colored sport jackets with big shoulders worn over deep-cut, also often brightly colored muscle tank tops or string tank shirts, or even no shirt at all, letting a well-worked-out torso show and sometimes allowing the shoulder-padded jacket to slide off the wearer's own chiseled shoulder, a style that would continue into the early nineties. == 1990s ==