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Are the 80s back?

05 Apr

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ARE THE 80S BACK?

Lately, I have been wondering whether I am simply getting old, or whether there is something in the zeitgeist pushing me to default to “the classics”. I no longer have the energy to even pretend to participate in microtrends. The Graza-fication of every CPG brand fills me with dread when I see a wheatpaste campaign for a formerly indie brand like DS & Durga. I mean, it’s only a matter of time before the Polar Seltzer can looks exactly like Poppi. 

I buy a lot of my clothes at Los Angeles Apparel, in the long tradition of you pick two: good prices, founder not a sex pest, or made in America. As a millennial, I am mentally trapped in the Jenna Lyons era of J. Crew and will probably never stop shopping there. (Friend of Dirt, Drew Austin, penned an Obituary for Millennial Culture at Vice this week.) To be honest, my libidinal fascination with J. Crew goes even further back, to when the prettiest girls in my cabin at summer camp had the catalogs sent to them directly. 

I no longer have the energy to refresh Resy pages or show up somewhere where I might not be seated––no matter how many great meals I’ve had at Thai Diner (to be fair, the White Lotus special menu looked great.) These days, I find myself gravitating toward spots like Sant Ambroeus and The Odeon.

Which brings me to my overarching question––are the 80s back? Sant Ambroeus first opened in Manhattan in 1982 on Madison Avenue and The Odeon was established in 1980 by Lynn Wagenknecht, Keith McNally, and Brian McNally. The McNally brothers come up a lot in Graydon Carter’s memoir When the Going Was Good, which I am reading now. 

Despite the economic turmoil of the 80s––the decade began with stagflation and soared to fantastic heights before the Black Monday stock market crash in October 1987––it was a Golden Age for magazines. There was no para-content to compete with, and for the yuppie, a newsstand copy of Vogue was still cheaper than a new shirt. (The 80s also marked the explosion of self-help titles, without which GQ’s wellness vertical might not exist today.) 

A bad economy means businesses need to advertise more to break out of competition––this could be good news for niche, engaged audiences, although if the screw turns hard enough, there won’t be anyone left to address the niche. Donald Trump, who allegedly hasn’t heard the term stagflation in years, seems determined to repeat history with a chaotic tariff policy rollout that rocked domestic and global markets this week. 

The 80s were characterized by an extreme wealth divide and visible poverty. I urge you to read Michael Friedrich’s review of There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone in The Baffler: “All told, the actual number of people without housing in America may reach more than four million, Goldstone writes, dwarfing HUD’s most recent count of 770,000.”

The suburbs, which became less monolithic in the 80s, are currently…strange. Malls, the undead ones, are getting Eataly. New York State has a new post-Covid class of Supercommuters. (I don’t count myself as one, but I am an ally.) Uber and OpenTable are teaming up. It seems that wherever Treatlerites live, they want to pretend that they live in the center of the universe, and that’s not a victimless crime. The rot in the soul of our culture right now goes beyond towering cookie shakes and shitty murals. Stay with me here…

Yes, the West Village is Charleston. With the closure of Marlow & Sons, Williamsburg just might complete its slow molt into Nashville. But this rot is more than “let people enjoy things” run amok. It’s the emotional militarization of the portion of the population that wants other people to suffer more than they want themselves to succeed. 

The 80s were more than a turning point in the industrial economy. They were the beginning of the ascent of total power enjoyers over total freedom enjoyers.

I ran a poll on Twitter the other day asking: would you rather have total power, or total freedom? Everyone who answered said freedom. Any power I have desired (enough money to run my own business, live where I want, support artists I believe in financially) has been in the interest of freeing myself. 

The 80s were more than a turning point in the industrial economy. They were the beginning of the ascent of total power enjoyers over total freedom enjoyers. These people don’t want freedom to do what they want to do––they want the power to tell you who you can marry, which genocides you can protest, and how you plan your family. And if you push back, they want to see you suffer more than they want happiness for themselves. After all, they are miserable. And they look like shit! 

“At least give us some NatSec tough guys with fewer gross tattoos, less obvious religious derangements, and a better capacity to hold their liquor,” writes Patrick Blanchfield in n+1. I suppose we’ll know that the 80s are really back when a new Andrea Dworkin has been chosen.

It’s too soon to say whether the economic turmoil of this week will plunge us into an entertainment environment that more resembles the 80s than the current Weimar ZIRP. Can Vanity Fair turn around after the departure of Radhika Jones? Are there enough yuppies left in America to increase revenue for L.L. Bean? Is Mad Realities the new MTV? Is Adam22 the new Howard Stern? Can movies stay in theaters for more than two seconds? Keep reading Dirt to find out! 

Regardless, nostalgia for the Golden Age of magazines isn’t going away anytime soon. Carter’s memoir has already formed an intellectual triptych in my mind with Keith McNally’s I Regret Almost Everything (out in May) and Michael Grynbaum’s history of Condé Nast (out in July). 

And that’s fine by me. Dirt is a small media company that I run like a big media company because I believe it’s important to have a vision of the future that isn’t just worse versions of things we already have. There’s no bigshot publishing executive to reach down from the sky and appoint me as their successor. (If such a person could admit that a media company can be built without generational wealth in the 2020s, they would probably have to face some uncomfortable truths about themself first.)

Then again, maybe I am actually living in the 1880s. After all, I just made my wedding anniversary reservation at Keens. — Daisy Alioto