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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.
The cultural resonances of the 1980s present on our screens, runways, and concert stages make today ideal for recontextualising its enduring legacy of maximalism and excess. Eighties offers a unique opportunity to do so with David Bailey as a guide, and interpreter, who’s never afraid to wink at his audience. As Bailey says in his foreword, “The eighties turned out to be magic.” Here, that magic comes alive.
„David Bailey is someone who was at the heart of the fashion, art, and society scene as a chronicler. His simply titled Eighties album presents the Olympus of that era. Many icons live on in his photos. His photo series were style-defining and are timeless classics.”
“With Eighties, TASCHEN pays tribute to David Bailey's work in the 80s... Bailey's inimitable sense for the moment and his ability to simultaneously stage the façade and allow the reality behind the staging to shine through is magical.”
“Serve[s] not only as a visual narrative but a time capsule, one that eloquently preserves the grit, glamour, and contradictions of this turbulent and historic period.”
“In an illustrated book, star photographer David Bailey pays a photographic and fashionable tribute to the decade.”
“Fun and sensuality.”
“The visual story of an epic moment that continues to knock on the fashion world’s door today.”
“British photographer David Bailey captures the excess, glamour and audacity of the decade that made everything bigger and brighter.”
“More than 200 snaps of that decadent decade by the prolific London-born fashion and portrait photographer.”
“This lavish book takes readers back to the era of power dressing... From the pages of Vogue and Tatler, Bailey's 1980s images have become some of his best known.”
“The era of excess — in pictures.”
“A collection of [David Bailey's] most striking pictures.”
“Bailey captures the playfulness, intensity, and excitement of the era.”
“Two decades on from David Bailey the upstart we arrive at David Bailey the established documentarian in an era of bold colours and big hair.”
“A hefty new tome not short of shoulder pads and lycra.”
“The paper is thick, beautifully white and the print quality is exceptional. It really is very nice to feel as well as to look at.”
“The book serves as testament to the era’s fun and frivolity while also offering an intimate look at some of its fabled characters.”
“Every shot is a power play of personality and staging, every page a celebration of an era in which glamour and drama formed a perfect symbiosis. Great Britain's super photographer David Bailey is fittingly celebrated in David Bailey. Eighties.”
“Few photographers have shaped fashion photography of this time as much as the great Londoner... Bright colors, lycra, spandex, highly coiffed hair, power shoulders – it couldn't be more glamorous on 296 pages (in XL format, of course).”
“A style bible.”
“Are we waiting for the eighties? Did it happen? Was I away?”