Big backcombed hair, shoulder pads, jumpers tucked into trousers tucked into ankle boots, voluminous leather blousons, jacket sleeves rolled up to the elbows, snow-washed jeans, ear cuffs, white socks, leather ties. . . are you really sure you're ready for the 1980s revival? The box-office success of The Wedding Singer, an amiable and deeply dumb romantic comedy which has been topping the charts here for the last two weeks, would have you believe that it's time to relive the glory days of Live Aid and Flashdance.
If, as the old joke has it, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, there's certainly plenty of it about, and the rehabilitation of 1970s fashions over the past few years has meant that there has been a revision of values - the 1980s have now fully taken on the mantle of the Decade that Taste Forgot, a natural precursor to becoming the Decade that was so Bad it's Good, and finally the Decade that was Really Kind of Cool.
Writers such as J.G. Ballard have argued that we live in an accelerated culture in which we continually recycle our images, to a point where they lose all meaning. But actually a fairly predictable set of rules seems to apply in the retro game, which is now an established part of the consumer cycle. The period is first forgotten, then reviled, before being plundered as a source of kitsch iconography. Finally, it becomes so integrated into the mainstream that it disappears again, perhaps to be rediscovered in another 10 years' time. Fifties nostalgia has completed the curve, from movies such as American Graffiti and Grease through Levi's commercials and rock 'n' roll revivals to the point where franchised fake "diners" pop up on every corner. The first step, however, is to pick up on the era's most quintessentially awful moments; hence, for the first time in years, the word "Kajagoogoo" is now heard throughout the land.
Our obsession with slicing our recent history into decade-sized chunks based on a random mathematical figure often flies in the face of reality, but these things do exert a fascination on the collective imagination. We know what is meant by the "Fifties" or the "Seventies" (the helter-skelter pandemonium of the 1960s is a different and more complex matter). We know that the "Eighties" means something as well, but what exactly? By the end of the decade itself Oliver Stone's Wall Street and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities had satirised a loadsamoney culture already past its peak, and the champagne-swilling, coke-snorting, Porsche-driving yuppie had become the emblematic figure of the era. The 1980s, it appeared, was the decade of greed, of a swing to the right, of the reversal of the sexual revolution in the face of AIDS. But retro nostalgia trades in a different currency, defined by the consumer tastes of those who were teenagers at the time.
Social issues are a no-no, but trash television, disposable pop and adolescent fashion trends become the shorthand for redefining the era. And, even if they were nothing else, the mid-1980s were certainly a good time for shallow, trashy pop, a fact which the makers of the first wave of nostalgia movies have been quick to exploit. We're still just about close enough to think that the mid1980s was a terrible time for music, but revisionism will soon be setting in. With fashion, it will take a little longer.
"Everything in the Eighties was man-made, so we used combinations of teal and pink or purple and yellow - combinations you haven't seen since," says The Wedding Singer's director. And won't see for some time to come, we hope. Teal and pink? It's today's five- and six-year-olds who will be faced with the full awfulness of retro 1980s fashion as they move into their teens.
The Wedding Singer is no masterpiece, and its 1980s gags are pretty crudely grafted onto the plot, but there's a great rendition of Spandau Ballet's True by Steve Buscemi, and, with a soundtrack including the Thompson Twins, Lionel Richie and Buggles, it certainly dredges the nether regions of this particular musical landscape.
The one song which features on the soundtracks of both The Wed- ding Singer and last year's Grosse Pointe Blank (the first harbinger of the revival) is Nena's bubblegum eco-anthem 99 Red Balloons. One-hit wonders like Nena are wonderful for nostalgism because they're not still around to mess with the memories. But setting the story in 1985 was astute - this was the moment when the US succumbed to a wave of British synth-pop, led by the likes of the Eurythmics, Simple Minds and Culture Club. Effete young men with impractical fringes doing epileptic dances behind dinky little keyboards became the coolest things around, despite the dancing. For Americans of a certain age, this period was akin to an occupation by an evil foreign power, and they still shudder at the memory.
Where did it all end? Was it the fall of the Berlin Wall, the stock market crash or even the first Stone Roses record? For whatever reason, people started brushing their hair forward instead of back, and the 1980s were suddenly over. But be warned - Big Country and Simple Minds are both on tour at the moment, and the word is that Howard Jones is planning a comeback. Can Nik Kershaw and Haircut 100 be far behind? And will Molly Ringwald become the John Travolta of her generation?
In Ireland, however, it's a little bit different. Despite the invaluable contribution of U2 to the Eighties Bad Taste file (Bono's hair is particularly exemplary, and the band as a whole seemed inordinately fond of those odd shirts with the diagonal button arrangements), this country sat out the 1980s under a pall of gloom. The 1980s in fact, were our 1970s. If you're looking for a decade of conspicuous consumption, loadsamoney, property booms and smugness, after all, who needs a 1980s revival when you're living the real thing in Nineties Ireland?