VLT Editorial
THE 1980s: POWER & EXCESS
Broad shoulders, sharp leather, and absolute financial domination.
The shoulder pad is the defining silhouette artifact of the 1980s and also its most honest metaphor. It makes you larger. It asserts space. It says: I am taking up the room I am entitled to, and the fabric will make this geometrically legible.
Women entered the corporate world in meaningful numbers in the 1980s for the first time in history, and fashion responded with a garment that looked like armour. The power suit, enormous shoulders, sharp lapels, strong color, was not an imitation of menswear. It was a new language for a new situation: how do you dress for authority when the rooms you're entering were not built for you?
Giorgio Armani and Donna Karan answered that question differently. Armani made unstructured softness that accumulated power through restraint. Karan made the body itself the structure. Both were responding to the same brief: a generation of women who needed to sit at the head of the table and needed clothing that knew it.
These images are shot in boardrooms. This is where the clothes belonged.
