Remembering fashion fads and mistakes

The wrong choice of apparel is the quickest way to make yourself look like a total knob or a dinosaur, or in the case of Motley Crue, both. 

There I was, innocently minding my own business, watching the Live 8 spectacular on Sunday when all of a sudden the band that time forgot appeared. 

Admittedly, back in the 1980s, I thought Motley Crue was okay. I even looked at the band members product-laden hair with a touch of admiration. 

Fast forward to 2005 and there they all were, on my TV screen, looking pretty much unchanged. The same clothes, the same hair-dos. Im not even sure they’d showered since 1985. 

Fashion can be a strange thing but perhaps Oscar Wilde summed it up best when he said: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months” . 

Current fashion trends are more than a little confusing. First we have little girls being dressed in crop tops and tight mini skirts to look like pocket-sized trailer park trash. 

Then there are the grown women, many of them in their 40s and 50s, wearing little girl clothes — pink frills and fluff, polka dots, mittens and ribbons. I’m not sure which version I find the most disturbing. 

If you want to have a giggle at fashion transgression of bygone years, in the 1970s has a good range of clothing and fads to poke the borax at. Sister sites In the 80s and In the 90s cover the next two decades. 

Fiftiesweb has fashion fads for earlier eras, and also covers slang, music and pop culture. 

Looking at the changing fashions over the past few decades, the pattern for everything old being new again is pretty obvious but there are some trends that should stay in the past. Mullets and sideburns spring to mind. Oh, and 1980s hard rocking dudes need to move with the times. 

Perhaps Carson and the rest of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy boys need to pay a visit to Motley Crue.