Nights of Shining Glamour

Yesterday while I was frantically looking for historical images of women bedecked with bows (that I didn’t use anyway), I came across this lovely fashion editorial from a 1987 issue of Australian Vogue. It looks so quintessentially Eighties, doesn’t it, but a more sophisticated style than one usually thinks of – or perhaps that is just a trick of photography?

On the opening page of the fashion section, the fashion editor has written:

“As though by design – exactly what it is – dressing this winter has crystallised into two distinctly different images, as different as night and day, each counterbalancing the other, in an ideal blueprint for a modern woman’s life. There is the pared-down polish of looks made to move upward in corporate realms, to aid you in confronting your day with authority and competence. And clothes for nights of shining glamour, fantasies in taffeta and velvet, tulle and sequins, clothes cut out for nothing but pleasure.

There’s no better way to signal the flip side of your workday self than by the way you look. Shed your corporate carapace and emerge as another kind of creature, more fantastic than earthbound. Your transformation may come as a surprise to those who know you as a no-nonsense competent. Good. Who wants to be predictable? More important still, you may surprise yourself.”

Now I’m imagining a sturdy little caterpillar, working away by day, and a shining butterfly, frivolously beating through the night. Wearing bows, of course.

Tearsheets from Vogue Australia, May 1987; phographed by Claus Wickwrath