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.

Photos Courtesy of Taschen