The last decade of recklessness – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Musee des Arts decoratifs is hosting the Annees 80 exhibition, dedicated to the everyday culture of this decade in France. The word “deployed” most accurately reflects its character: the space of French aesthetics of the 80s unfolds in front of the viewer like a colorful carpet – design, advertising, graphics, fashion. In fact, we are shown the last decade exuding the carefree spirit of the bourgeois prosperity of a first world country.
Under the arches of the Museum of Decorative Arts, the world of the 80s shines with open flowers of uncompromising positivity. And even the election poster of François Mitterand, whose victory in 1981 began the 80s, which fell within his two terms, is placed on a cheerful yellow background. Yes, it was no longer the “glorious thirtieth anniversary”, yes, oil prices were no longer the same, and the ideals of 1968 had already faded, but France in the 80s, where the left came to power for the first time in the Fifth Republic, was far from the depressive Thatcher England and puritanical neo-liberal Reagan America. The curators tell us that this poster with the slogan “Quiet Power” was the beginning of the first marketing campaign in politics. Actually, the whole space of the Musee des Arts decoratifs, divided into three naves – graphic art and advertising, design, fashion – has been turned into such a temple of positive full-color marketing.
The word “marketing”, boring to the current rumor, was not at all so in the 80s – on the contrary, marketing was frantic, sparkling and full of freedom. The graphic arts, the world of the “graphists,” as they are called in France, are experiencing their golden era during these years. Mitterand unfolds the most ambitious cultural and social projects – the Musee d’Orsay, La Villette and the Cite des sciences et de l’industrie in it, the Institut du Monde Arabe – and graphics become his most important communication tool, and on the other hand, French retail is experiencing the heyday of commercial advertising . And, of course, the covers of the French press, involved in both. From the front page of Liberation on March 12, 1985, with a portrait of a smiling Gorbachev and the headline “Kremlin New-Look,” to a Wrangler jeans ad featuring a baby swimming inside a gestational sac in jeans, with the slogan “Taille pour l’aventure” (“Designed for adventures”). From 1981 to 1989, the French advertising market grows by a fantastic 380% – all fears about the left government were in vain, France is experiencing a real dawn of commercial advertising. The very type of modern advertising agency, built around an art director and a copywriter, arises in France at that time. Money and creativity form a happy union in the French advertising space, and the 80s become the decade when the very phenomenon of French pop culture, familiar to us from French cinema, as well as from the French stage, is formed.
Obviously, the 80s were the last decade when everything was possible in advertising – and nothing could be too much. Next to the hall, where they show a half-hour video made up of commercials, it is appropriate for these days to post a warning about sensitive content that can hurt sensitive visitors. Political correctness was not commanded in France in the 80s, and it is unlikely that even this word itself appeared on the horizon of the then advertising agencies. This is a parade of all possible modern donts: male gaze – waitresses jumping in white pinafores with bows on the pope in front of a young man sitting in a sun lounger with a glass of Perrier, black face on the contrary – white powder covering the face of a black model sneezing over her in Lee Cooper jeans, race prejudice is a flashy westernized young Chinese woman racing a red Citroen up the Great Wall of China and engaging in dialogue with comical Chinese peasants. What can we say about bare nipples and buttocks.
The real stars of that era are the designers – the young Philippe Starck appears on French television and furnishes the bedroom of Danielle Mitterrand in the renovated apartments of the presidential couple in the Elysee Palace. And the president’s bedroom is furnished by another star of architecture and design, Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and in general a pool of designers and architects is formed around Mitterrand. The entire central space of the museum is occupied by furniture – graphic leather, metal and plastic by Starck, multi-colored objects by Pierre Sala, in which surrealism is mixed with constructivism, neo-primitivist armchairs and lamps by Elisabeth Garust and Mattia Bonetti. This sparkling and radiant mix of styles and materials, which was then French design, creates the very postmodern vibe that is important for understanding the era, because it is postmodernism that becomes the key aesthetic of the 80s in everything from the highest to the most applied art.
The dresses displayed next to the furniture create completely organic unities with it. And if you look at the fashion of the 80s through the filter of all other design, then it is its postmodern dimension that will fall into sharpness. The very arrangement of Jean Paul Gaultier’s things (it should be noted that they were not chosen at all banal), with their intertexts and allusions, perfectly corresponds with the arrangement of furniture of the main stars of the era, and Christian Lacroix’s crazy color combinations are surrounded not only by his own interior design, but are rhymed with designer searches its counterparts in the related industry. All these combinations are a great success for the curatorial team of the exhibition.
Fashion does not exist here at all as a separate set of names and looks – it is immersed in the context of the then design and the phenomena of the cultural life of the 80s. One of them is the flowering of club culture, which allows us to understand the origins of the extravagance of this fashion. Parisian clubs become important institutions, their underground bohemian crowd turns into the establishment, and the former purely club subculture of exaggerated, even grotesque shapes, proportions and colors becomes the mainstay of mass fashion in the 80s. The names chosen here are obvious – Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana, Jean Paul Gaultier, Jean-Charles Castelbajac, Azzedine Alaya, Christian Lacroix, Pierre Cardin (the choice of their bows is just not the most predictable), but the overall picture is very accurate, and, for example, Saint Laurent occupies a modest corner place in it with just one dress. But there are far less well-known, and sometimes not at all, names that are extremely interesting to discover – Sybilla Sorondo and her outfits sculpted from fabric like sculptures, Adeline Andre and her purest minimalism, Anne-Marie Beretta and her striking asymmetrical silhouettes.
It all—dresses, posters, lamps, tables, and commercials—comes, overlaps, and mixes together in the great postmodern kaleidoscope of the 1980s, where you could be as eccentric, weird, and brash as you wanted. And the longer you wander under the arches of the museum, the more clearly you understand that the world of victorious political correctness and new ethics, where no one allows himself a single sudden movement, of course, is a great achievement of Western humanism, but how bright, radiant, attractive and, most importantly, how that world of the 80s looks free. Yes, we have made our conscious exchange of that freedom for that justice, but the exhibition Annees 80 makes us feel a keen nostalgia for a violent era when such freedom was still possible.
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