Lauren Hutton. David Hockney. Iman. Michael Jackson. Brooke Astor. Anne Bass. Mercedes Bass. Raquel Welch. Vernon Jordan. Countess Brandolini d’Adda. Tom Wolfe. Gayatri Devi. Lena Horne. Sugar Ray Leonard.

What does this litany have in common? They were all on the International Best Dressed List in the 1980s, a decade full of vulgarity and judgment and abundance as a virtue. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both made the Eleanor Lambert-founded list in the 1980s, as did Ivana Trump, which signaled asymmetrically the conflation of politics and vulgarity we have now.

Indeed, people think of the 1980s as rather harmless frivolity: all that extravagance transformed into fun, all that big hair, all that frou-frou and frolicking. But the Wolfe at the door back then (not just on the list) was a preening, writerly one who warned us of its dangers. In his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe costumed his characters not only with his writerly eye but also with his sartorial one, always keenly aware of the signaling that clothes made about a person – about himself – because what one wears is based on the decisions one makes. “You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes,” he claimed.

The novel is such a descriptive cavalcade of clothing, in fact, that its pages could have been cut by a hundred or so had he not been so fixated on fashion as a barometer of the decade as well as the delineation of one’s character and standing in life.

Wolfe described one of the outfits worn by the character Judy McCoy, the wife of bond trader Sherman McCoy , as having “short puffed sleeves the size of Chinese lampshades.” Puffed sleeves and Christian Lacroix’s pouf skirts were the first two things I thought of when I began to contemplate writing this essay about that time. And the leg warmers Jane Fonda wore in her workout videos. The ripped sweatshirt worn by Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. Madonna’s mash- up of jewelry and headbands and Doc Martens in Desperately Seeking Susan. Cher’s Bob Mackie get-up for the 1986 Oscars. There was the jut of padded shoulders on parade. And just about everyone wore a power suit. John Forsythe and Linda Evans even made the International Best Dressed List in the 1980s because of Dynasty, a nighttime soap opera in which its in-house designer, Nolan Miller, normalized the excesses of the decade. The decade might not have had a sense of irony about itself, but it sure did have a sense of camp.

It was also the decade of Nancy Reagan and her let-them-eat-cake characteristics, which led her to be demonized by some. There was a streamlined elegance to Nancy Reagan. She appreciated the designs of James Galanos, Adolfo Sardiña, Carolina Herrera, and Oscar de la Renta. She “never made a fashion faux pas,” according to de la Renta. She was a guest at the CFDA Fashion Awards a couple of times and even received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988 for which she wore a “Reagan Red” Oscar de la Renta gown. She and Joan Collins conflated to become the decade’s longest shadow – a First Lady who brought a sleek Southern California style acumen to bear into the country’s cultural consciousness and an English dame who carried her show on her overly-padded shoulders and, from time to time, elbowed Nancy aside in the cultural consciousness in the way she could elbow Evans from the frame before one of their celebrated fights.

One 1980s style maven, Pat Buckley, really did cast a long shadow during the 1980s. Long- limbed, a lit cigarette always at the ready, Buckley was a stretch limo in a dress. Dinner party palaver was her native tongue. The wife of conservative icon William F. Buckley and the mother of writer Christopher Buckley, she was paired by the Met with Diana Vreeland, who had been named a consultant to the Costume Institute in 1972, in order for Buckley to chair its annual fundraising dinner.

During the Vreeland/Buckley 1980s decade, the guests would arrive for cocktails in the Great Hall before descending to the basement to see the exhibit. Then they would saunter over for dinner in the Met’s cafeteria, referred to by some as “The Dorotheum” because it had been designed by Dorothy Draper to include a reflecting pool and birdcage chandeliers. Once fed and another social debt fulfilled, most of the tony lot would go home, but not Pat. She and her cigarettes would head over to the Temple of Dendur, where there was an after-party for those holding cheaper tickets, including students from Parsons which had been given an allotment. Buckley would sit at a high top table at a safe distance from the dance floor, drinking in the students’ stories of their lives, which still had room enough for hope.

One can’t write about the decade and the fashion world during the 1980s without writing about the darker arrival of AIDS, the longest shadow of all. There might have been a sense of elegance in the White House during the 1980s, but there was no sense of urgency or empathy or decency there at the beginning of the pandemic as it began to decimate the ranks of fashion designers and the professional and personal worlds that supported them. Willi Smith died in 1987. Make-up artist Way Bandy died in 1986. Fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez died in 1987. Angel Estrada died in 1989. Isaia Rankin died in 1989. Perry Ellis died in 1986. Halston and Patrick Kelly would die in 1990 and spent much of the decade’s last year knowing that they would not survive the next one. Ellis with the elegant nonchalance of his aesthetic, and the slyly sleek Halston and Kelly with the iconoclastic joy of his designs were all antidotes in their ways to the frenzied vulgarity of the time that morphed with AIDS into a frenzy of fear and denial and so many deaths. There are times I think that black became a fashion statement for so many in the industry – a uniform even – because it began to be worn so frequently in the 1980s as an awful procession of funerals and memorial services and obfuscating obits in The New York Times cast a pall over us all. The pall has lifted and sometimes shifted over the years, but the black in our wardrobes has remained to remind us of that time in our lives without reminding us specifically of all that grief.

The beginning of the decade began with Kim Alexis on the cover of the 1980 September issue of American Vogue photographed by Richard Avedon and ended with Naomi Campbell on its September 1989, also shot by Avedon. There is a kind of political arc in those two photos, a cultural shifting that one can chart from the beginning of the decade to its supermodel-era end. But it is Avedon’s photographs at the Brandenburg Gate on the last New Year’s Eve of the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 that furnishes us with the most iconic fashion images of the 10 years that came before. The Berliners were so jubilantly chic in their sharing of their freeing themselves from the decade itself and so many before it. And yet there was a sense of chaos and unease and even a kind a aggression toward the unknown, which was what freedom was for them. Look at those photos by Avedon to understand the 1980s and how the decade finally was a last gasp costumed as the end of 20th Century before the interregnum of the 1990s arrived and we figured out a way to still have room enough for hope.