Free Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) by Hadley Freeman

just say ‘absolutely everything Joan Cusack wears in this film’ and leave it at that.
    1 Desperately Seeking Susan
    The movie that proves everyone’s life is improved by eighties fashion.

 
    TOP FIVE COMMENTS ABOUT FASHION
    5 ‘This jacket used to belong to Jimi Hendrix.’
    ‘You bought a USED JACKET? What are we, poor?’ (Rosanna Arquette and Mark Blum, Desperately Seeking Susan )
    4 ‘Pink is my signature colour.’ (Julia Roberts, Steel Magnolias )
    3 ‘Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?’ (Judd Nelson, The Breakfast Club )
    2 ‘This is a really volcanic ensemble you’re wearing.’ (Jon Cryer, Pretty in Pink )
    1 ‘Six thousand dollars?! It’s nawt even leatha!’ (Joan Cusack, Working Girl )

Pretty in Pink :
    Awkward Girls Should Never Have Makeovers
    Until Molly Ringwald met John Hughes, she’d always felt wrong.
    ‘I was growing up on the west coast and just so self-conscious about my looks,’ she recalls from her home in California, her two children shouting happily in the background. ‘Back then I was surrounded by images of Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett, and that was the look then – that California blonde look, which was the opposite of what I was.’
    But Hughes – unusually, perhaps, for a thirty-something male director – recognised the appeal of the then fifteen-year-old Ringwald’s looks from the start, and he saw something in her, something unconventional. As soon as he came across her headshot in his pack of photos while looking for young actresses for his next film, with her snub nose, slightly slack jaw and bright red hair, he stuck it up on his billboard and, without even meeting her, wrote Sixteen Candles for her in two days.
    Hughes could see the value of Ringwald’s unfashionable looks for the same reason he was able to write films about teenagers that felt so true to young people at the time, and still do today: because, at heart, he was still the sensitive teenage outcast he loved to write about. ‘John was frozen in time emotionally in a way. He would not have been able to create the sense of truth in those characters had he not been so much like that himself,’ says director Howard Deutch, Hughes’s frequent collaborator.
    This meant he didn’t see teen films as an easy means to get sexy girls in bikinis up on the screen, as screenwriters for the hugely successful Porky’s – which came out in 1982, two years before Hughes’s first teen film Sixteen Candles – did. Rather, what he loved about teenagers was their complications as opposed to their cleavages.
    ‘When I started to work with John, I realised my differences could work to my advantage because they made me stand out, but in a good way. So my skin got even paler and my hair got redder,’ Ringwald says. He wanted his teenage actors to stay totally true to their teenage selves, to the point that they were encouraged to pick out their own clothes for the films. One of the few times Hughes ever chided Ringwald was when she turned up on set wearing eyeshadow: ‘He thought I was trying to be someone else.’ She smiles.
    Hughes, more than any other filmmaker, made the 1980s the golden age of teen films because he realised that the trick to making good films about teenagers was to take them as seriously as they take themselves. ‘One of the great wonders about that age is your emotions are so open and raw. That’s why I stuck around that genre for so long,’ he said in an interview. ‘At that age it feels as good to feel bad as it does to feel good.’ It’s only as a teenager, Hughes believed, that you have this capacity for deep feeling, which explains why his own work was divided between the swoonily soulful teen films, including Sixteen Candles , The Breakfast Club , Pretty in Pink , Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful , and the slapstick ‘dopey-ass comedy,’ as he put it, such as National Lampoon’s Vacation , The Great Outdoors and, in the nineties, Home Alone .