I love the 80s!!!!! (So exciting - 2 posts in one day!)

The Gardening Knitter informed her readers today (well, I read it today) that the 80s fashion trends are apparently coming back. Some of those fashion trends were a tad scary – remember large shoulder pads, wide belts over long tunic-y tops and skin-tight jeans? I was skinny enough back then that the skin-tight jeans weren't really a problem, but I do remember laying (lying?) on the bed and sucking my already flat stomach in in order to get those suckers zipped. Breathing was not an option!

I even had the two-tone jeans. Front of the pants were a grey acid-washed denim while the back were the blue acid-washed denim. Ah, memories. They were so cool! My favorite pair though was this pair I got at The Gap at Wonderland Mall (RIP Wonderland! Damn you, Wal-Mart) on the sale rack for something like $6. They were very tapered and I wore them with little pixie boots (grey suede) and I had them for years! I wore natural holes into the knees and remember getting quite upset the first time the worn faded oh so soft denim split. I was at the library (I worked at the library while at University) and had knelt down to get some books off the bottom rack of the book carts and all of a sudden my lily-white right knee was exposed. I nearly cried because I loved them so much. The good news was that it was right around the time that the ripped up jeans look was so "in," so I was right there! Usually I'm behind the fashion trends, but not then, oh no! I was at the forefront of the ripped up jeans, aren't I cool look!

And I wore those jeans for probably another two years (the left knee wore its own hole within a month of the right knee) and it didn't matter if it were the dead of winter or not, I wore those jeans with my vintage homeless lady wool coat (it was very damn thin, I will admit now, but at the time, I was very into my vintage look – rhinestones with jeans, old brooches on homeless lady coat, bowl cut hair with the sides and back shaved). When I started working at the Social Sciences Department as the student assistant in my last year I was known for wearing three different earrings – all dangling, all long, all silver (two in my right, one in my left) – and my ear band and my holey jeans. I had a wide black one which was the best since I was in my punk phase. The only time I wore a matching pair of earrings (one in the right ear and one in the left) was when I wore my chains. I still miss those, but I lost one one night when dancing.

And for a number of years every article of clothing in my wardrobe was black. One of my friends took to greeting me thusly, "I see you are wearing black today." And to this day, he'll greet me with this even though I'm so rarely wearing all black anymore. We will not discuss what I'm wearing today…but it might be all black.

I also wore rings on every finger (including thumbs). My younger cousins used to count them all the time and at one time I would wear something like 28 rings. Up until a couple of years ago I still wore a ring on every finger (the thumb rings got bent out of shape at my job in SF when the mailroom shelf doo-hickey thingy fell on my hand – thank God I was wearing those rings or I might have had a crushed thumb or two). I had progressed to having an opal ring for every finger (it had been a goal of mine), but then I got tired of the time it took to dry my hands every time I would go to the bathroom. I now wear one ring per hand and they're on my middle fingers, not my ring fingers – I gotta stay different somehow!

I'm so boring these days that I have color in my wardrobe, wear only matching earrings with my polar bear stud in the right ear (always). I have not given up my ear band and hope I never do. My present one I got in Egypt which means I've been wearing this one for ten years! Holy crap! Now that I mentioned that I'll probably lose the damn thing. DAMN IT!

Now when I thought about writing a post about the 80s, I was thinking mainly of the music. When I lived in SF, once a month there would be a dance party held at a local warehouse (essentially) called New Wave City. Now to me the title was self-explanatory, but when I invited people to go one Saturday, they asked me what kind of music it was. "Um, New Wave? You know, music from the late 70s and 80s." They were up for that, so we had a group meeting there. The one girl, in particular, of whom I'm thinking, got there and after a short while came up to me where I was dancing away on the dance floor (destroying my knees for later in life) to tell me that they were leaving (really no skin off my nose as I prefer to dance alone anyway) because the music wasn't what they were expecting. I was a little surprised as they were playing New Wave (The Smiths, New Order, Joy Division, Sex Pistols – yeah, I know it's punk, Iggy Pop, NIN, Echo and the Bunnymen, Style Council, The Jam, Japan, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and The Banshees, etc.). To me that is 80s music. That's what I was listening to the 80s, but it's not apparently what everybody else was listening to. ;-) This girl was expecting Prince and stuff like that.

When people say 80s music, what do you think of? And for that matter, when people say 80s fashions what's your first though?