The Vintage Reader

So I'm watching Flashdance (...and btw... ewwwwww! I just realized that she's supposed to be 18, and he's, like, 40!), which came out right before my senior year of high school started. Suddenly dancers were IT. And by the next year the craze was full-on. I went to a school with a growing dance department. My roommates ripped their sweatshirts strategically and wore legwarmers that were frayed at the bottom from actually dancing in them (or maybe just walking around campus; they looked cool, anyway). You could buy jazz shoes in cool colors at department stores (I had a pair of gray Capezios) and dancewear at the dime store.

I can't remember another movie that's had such an effect on fashion since... but I was 16 and 17 then, and probably much more susceptible to movie influences on fashion. Perhaps there have been others (The Matrix, maybe?) and I've just missed them. Of course, I've always heard that undershirt sales plummeted when Clark Gable didn't wear one in It Happened One Night, but according to Snopes, it could be that dear Mr. Gable was reflecting a trend, not setting one. And I suppose that could be the case with Flashdance too--but I knew a lot of dancers around the time it came out, even before college, and they all wore Levi's and Ralph Lauren, not headbands and legwarmers.