Re: 1980s Men's jeans
I remember the men’s stretch jeans in the early to mid 80s and the sexy adverts. I had a few pairs myself and wore them in the school holidays or in the evenings at boarding school and at uni as well. Both Levi and Wrangler. I still wear Levi’s and like you have a couple of pairs of skinny as a concession to modernity although like you my real preference is for the retro stretch style. To refer to an earlier post of mine, these 1980s stretch jeans go very well with an Army jumper.
Although I’m a big Levi’s fan, I have a special affection for Wranglers because they evoke my teenage years. They are much rarer today but a quick search has shown me that their men’s stretch jeans are still available and there’s a -10% offer if you sign up to their newsletter. Christmas has come early. www.wrangler.co.uk
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1980s Men's jeans
When men stopped wearing flared jeans at the start of the 1980s, a lot of them wore stretch jeans that were mostly fashionable from around 1980 to 1986.
I used to think that Shakin' Stevens was probably the most famous person to wear them, and as I can see from the ITV 3 repeats of Coronation Street, Kevin Webster, and sometimes Curly Watts wore them as well. They were everywhere, male characters from series like the Dukes of Hazard and even Prisoner: Cell Block H was seen with them on. I still think of them as "cool", and it's a pity that you could probably buy a pair of flares from the years before in these retro fashion shops that I sometimes see, but not 1980s jeans like that, probably because they don't look ironic enough a flares did.
The Wrangler and Levis adverts from the early to mid 1980s looked "sexier" than jeans adverts did later on that decade. I think that ended when we saw Nick Kamen go in the bath while wearing his, the tune to Sam Cooke's Wonderful World, or the launderette one, as parodied by Carling Black Label, straining to the tune of Marvin Gaye's big 1969 hit.
I suppose that now we see skinny jeans (and I even have a couple of pairs myself), probably because of the Vamps and One Direction, men's fashion has almost come full-circle in the past 35 years.
I am hoping that they might come back into fashion, considering that skinny jeans have done so. I remember trying to get a pair for a photo shoot I was doing a few years ago, but no luck. Water under the bridge fashion-wise, methinks.
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