fashioninhistory:
Evening Ensemble (Detail)
Yves Saint Laurent
Spring/Summer 1980
While a long, lean body remained the ideal in the 1980s, a new, wide shoulder began to be appended to the silhouette. Ornately rendered here by Yves Saint Laurent, the shoulder provided a foundation from which fabric could be draped down to a contrastingly narrow waist. In the hands of some 1980s designers, shoulders were padded out to absurd widths. To a degree, this was a revival of 1940s fashion. Toward the end of the 1980s and into the ’90s, historicist revivals by fashion designers have created such a multiplicity of silhouettes that finding the defining one will have to wait.
