Steal the look: Elegant eighties fashion in The Shards | Canada Voices

The phrase “the eighties are back” recirculates in fashion every so often. It tends to invoke a shiver, conjuring as it does vivid images of oversized shoulder pads, big hair and boxy neon-bright shirts.

Take heart: The 1980s are not a monolith, and the revival afoot involves neither the pastel suits and espadrilles of Miami Vice (1984) nor the garish, more-is-more of Rivals (set in 1986). This eighties revival, The Shards, concerns the earlier, gentler and frankly more interesting transitional period circa 1981 – the top of a new decade on the cusp of significant cultural, political and social change. It is as much a last gasp of the 1970s as it is a new fashion era.

Thanks to costume designers Lou Eyrich and Joshua Marsh, The Shards is rooted in that fleeting moment. Ryan Murphy’s coming-of-age horror-thriller (now streaming on Disney+ via Hulu) adapts literary brat packer Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 autofiction novel. The story is set in the fall of 1981 and follows a group of wealthy, hedonistic high school seniors at a Los Angeles prep school. Co-stars and nepo babies Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere (scions of supermodel Cindy Crawford, and of actors Richard Gere and Carey Lowell, respectively) may grace Vogue’s September issue in the latest Chanel, but it’s the pair’s throwback style in The Shards that feels timely this season.

“Susan [Gerber] feels so contemporary and so elegant, yet has a lot of seventies in her,” said Marsh. The high-achieving class president favours romantic, feminine blouses, while her boyfriend Thom (Graham Campbell) is the star jock clad in rugby shirts worn under blazers. Narrator Bret (Igby Rigney) is an elegantly preppy observer in Giorgio Armani and Gucci, dating Debbie (Hayes Warner), the wannabe-star who evokes a Mudd Club-era Debbie Harry. Magnetic newcomer Robert (Gere), meanwhile, exhibits a touch of Duran Duran’s John Taylor in cropped blazers and scarf ties.

Vintage copies of GQ, L’Officiel Hommes, Town & Country and Vogue were sources of inspiration for The Shards’ costume design, as were album covers and photographs of music and dance clubs. A Barneys ad in GQ’s September, 1981, issue features black Vakko leather pants like those worn by Robert (and updated for 2026 by Maison Margiela). American Gigolo and its louche, coolly elegant depiction of Los Angeles – and Richard Gere’s star-making wardrobe by Giorgio Armani, which marked the arrival of relaxed Italian tailoring in menswear – were also references, particularly for main character Bret.

“The late seventies was this huge push for what I’d say is the European look,” said Toronto vintage clothing expert Ian Drummond. He added that in the era of glamorous, jet-setting cultural icons such as Bianca and Mick Jagger, there was a desire to appear more continental and less American. Into the early eighties, Drummond noted, “fashion starts to get all slouchy and textured, with a bit more volume.”

This influence is characterized by relaxed elegance and ease, he added, and a move away from synthetic fabrics to natural materials such as linen, hammered silk satin and wool cashmere.

Listing menswear labels Cerruti, Henry Grethel and Perry Ellis, Drummond noted that sourcing vintage pieces from this period is more challenging than finding later 1980s fare. “I think men are hanging onto it because they really, really love it,” he said.

The Shards is peppered with other touchstones of eighties fashion such as Victor Costa, Halston and Yves Saint Laurent, as if the characters shopped at upscale department store of the day Fred Segal. It was also, as Marsh pointed out, the beginning of mall culture. Scenes from the first episode are set at a recreation of Sherman Oaks Galleria, the landmark shopping mall featured in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl that opened in 1980 and was one of Ellis’s regular haunts in high school.

“It wasn’t just fashion, capital-F Fashion,” Marsh said of the cultural forces shaping youth culture. “It was also the kind of elevated basics that were coming into play. That Calvin Klein denim ad with Brooke Shields was a big piece for us, on all of our [mood] boards.” The print and TV campaign, featuring a then-15-year-old Shields, debuted in 1980 and became one of the most influential fashion ads of all time. The following year, the model and actor was the face of Vogue’s September issue, which Susan would have read while shopping for back-to-school.

As narrator Bret observes in the novel: “The male fashion in that moment was still streamlined, preppie, at times vaguely Italian, more The Garden of the Finzi-Continis than The Lost Boys – we were a long way from shoulder pads and mullets and the clownish kitsch from the mid-1980s…”.

That preppy sensibility had by then evolved beyond its East Coast roots into a more upscale interpretation, which was then further filtered through a West Coast lens. It’s a style that’s resurfacing today. In another show look plucked from American Gigolo, Bret wears a knit long-sleeved henley shirt, a trending men’s staple for fall 2026. The series’ colour palette similarly could have been lifted from Pantone’s fall fashion trend report, with shades such as Foxglove, a pink-mauve, and Underworld, a mid-tone grey in line with the ‘greige’ neutrals popularized by Armani in the seventies.

Some of those pieces are now making a return, thanks to the Armani/Archivio project. Launched last year to mark the label’s 50th anniversary, the initiative faithfully reissues pieces from Armani’s archive, speaking to the brand’s enduring appeal and the thriving second-hand market. The 13-look men’s and women’s capsule debuted in April and was built around the brand’s jacket designs, including pinstriped alpaca from 1979, blousons from 1983 and a double-pleat trouser from 1981.

The refrain, “Could we be more amazing? Could we push things more?” reverberated in cast fittings for The Shards, Marsh said, but always with the goal of being faithful to 1981.

“We could take a smidgen of license, but we never wanted to push things to being inaccurate,” he said. “We wanted to create this elevated, really cool, sophisticated world for these young, vibrant characters to live in – but we also want our audience to want to live inside it.”