Nov
3
2009
Did you get the memo? Shoulder pads are back..
Oh no. Shall we all take a moment and remember those good old bad old days when our lipstick was too bright, we wore electric blue mascara, we had big hair and even bigger shoulder pads? Well don’t be getting too nostalgic about it because shoulder pads are BACK. And not in a retrotastic, vintagey kind of way…oh no, this is not a trend for the kool kids…they are back in a Power Dressing/Dynasty kind of way.
I know this because I read it in the Financial Times so it must be true. Although I will admit that the FT probably isn’t too well known for having its finger on the pulse of fashion…but read it here ‘Recession spurs the rise of the ‘lipstick entrepreneurs”. It’s a fairly interesting article about the increase in women starting their own businesses, partly due to the rise in redundancies but also a more general shift in the way that we are all choosing to work. Personally I think ‘lipstick entrepreneur’ is a ghastly term, is it me or does it have slightly sneery slightly sexist overtones? But I digress…
Anyway, scroll down right to the bottom of the article and there’s a little nugget about power dressing. I bet Mr Brian Groom (Business and Employment Editor for the FT) never thought he’d see the day when he was writing about power dressing. Apparently those lipstick entrepreneurs aren’t plonked at their kitchen tables running their global empires in their jammies…they’re dressing up for the occasion and dressing up in 2009 means “power shoulders”.
But, get this, as well as buying jackets with power shoulders already built in and ready to intimidate…those thrifty lipstick entrepreneurs are doing it themselves. To the extent that John Lewis have SOLD OUT of all shoulder pads in all of their stores across the UK, as women have been panic buying to “stack them vertically or horizontally in anything from cashmere sweaters to last year’s jackets”. What madness is this? Has sexual equality made such little progress in the last 20 years that we still feel like we need to bolster our confidence by bolstering our shoulders, whether it be ‘vertically or horizontally’? Sheesh, soon we’ll all be doing our colours again too…
Naturally some old fashioned female rivalry has crept in. Not content with their ‘power shoulders’, some lookatmelookatme types are going for ‘extreme shoulders’….”Extreme shoulders, which some shoppers are opting for, can take up to four shoulder pads each side and build a 2×2in stack for maximum boardroom confidence,” said Jo Hooper, head of womenswear buying [at John Lewis].
It’s hard to know which is more comical: the mental image of “extreme shoulders” or the rather tragic belief that big fat shoulders = “maximum boardroom confidence”, whatever the hell that means. I would imagine that the board will submit to whatever Ms Extreme Shouldered Lipstick Entrepreneur wants for fear of personal injury,”Arggggh….it’s ok….it’s ok….here take whatever it is that you want…just…don’t…shoulder me…OK?”
Either that or they’re too busy pissing themselves laughing.
Some Lipstick Entrepreneurs earlier today
snigger, snigger, snort! Lovely to read you again Spud. You’ve been sorely missed.
This was brilliant! I loved my’80’s shoulder pads, I felt so cool and confident in them. Flash forward 20 years and they just feel like something else to carry.
Best fashion advice I’ve ever had: if you wore a trend to the first time, best to not wear it again it returns!
Wonderful to have you back; hope all is peaceful!
Those shoulder pads were so stupid looking!
AaaWWWwww man, shoulder pads were hideous……however, I do remember being particular about how I wore mine…..I had this blazer, black and white houndstooth looking, I wore until it shredded….it was sort of Madonnaesque……man it was hideous….plus I had a friend who was going through beauty school back then and I ALWAYS had HUGE hair….that was hideous, too! Ah, a trip dowm memory lane…..all done….
♥
S
this frightens me mostly because you cannot go back to a fashion/decade that you already experienced. where are the 50s when we need them? they also had good lipstick. but more worrying, in my view, are the giant flowers or halves of a perfectly good parrot that otherwise normal people appear to be wearing on their heads in public. what the hell is that?
on the bright side, i have an excellent heavily-shouldered-padded black & white suit in my parents’ basement. and i loved it. of course, i need to lose at least 20 pounds to fit into it again…
I’m rocking the shoulder pads light version in my hand me down 80’s leather jacket from my grandpa.
I love my pajama wardrobe. Don’t miss the shoulder pads one iota.
Oh yes, tell me about the sculpture image…very interesting.
I just KNOW I have some shoulder pads upstairs in the attic somewhere… I was a year or so late catching onto that trend before, so now maybe I can be early!
Oh NO! I remember my mom doing the crazy shoulder pad thing. I won’t do it. You can’t make me.
Thank Zeus I’ll never see the inside of a boardroom. Someone might accidentally poke my eye out (or something even more precious). With their lipstick or shoulder pads. I’m duly afraid of both ‘weapons of entrepreneurship’.
Okay, I’m going out on a limb here. I loved everything about shoulder pads and have held my breath for 25 years waiting for them to cycle back into fashion (obviously I was 4 when they were popular). All this talk of shoulder pads and not one mention of what they do for the hips???? For me the SP was all about balance (or so I enjoyed believing). When you’ve got hips that can bear triplets side-by-side, a little width around the shoulders does wonders to even things out. I, for one (apparently the only one) am glad shoulder pads are back! So Spud, any word from FT on my other 80s fav, stirrup pants?
[...] a few weeks back, when I said shoulder pads are back? And introduced the concept of ‘extreme shoulders’? Well, turns out Lady Gaga must be a [...]