David Bailey’s take on the era of excess

In the 1980s, fashion wanted to make a statement and found in legendary British fashion photographer David Bailey its perfect chronicler. After Bailey shaped the style of the Swinging Sixties, fashion in the eighties posed a new challenge: brighter colours, higher glamour, statuesque models, extreme makeup, spandex, lycra, jumpsuits, power dressing, big hair, and as Grace Coddington puts it in her introduction, “jackets with padded shoulders over the shortest mini-skirts and dangerously high-heeled shoes.”

Eighties compiles Bailey’s era-defining fashion photography from the pages of Vogue Italia, Vogue Paris, Tatler, and countless others. Featuring couture, catwalk, and ready-to-wear collections by the epoch’s seminal designers, including Azzedine Alaïa, Comme des Garçons, Guy Laroche, Missoni, Stephen Jones, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent, the book stands as a testament to a decade that dismantled hierarchies of taste to reintroduce fun and sex into fashion, reminding us that we need not think of either as dirty words. Here, the jewellery sparkles, the silks shimmer, and the suits sprawl. The most beautiful are captured at their most playful, invincible, and provocatively sexy. We see fabled 1980s icons and beauties: Catherine Bailey, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Catherine Deneuve, Princess Diana, Jerry Hall, Marie Helvin, Grace Jones, Kelly LeBrock, Christy Turlington, Tina Turner, and many more.

The cultural resonances of the 1980s present on our screens, runways, and concert stages make today ideal for recontextualising its enduring legacy of maximalism and excess. Eighties offers a unique opportunity to do so with David Bailey as a guide, and interpreter, who’s never afraid to wink at his audience. As Bailey says in his foreword, “The eighties turned out to be magic.” Here, that magic comes alive.