80s Fancy Dress Tips ... Fashion of the 80s moved on from the 1970’s by transforming the outrageous harsh Punk styles into softer, friendlier high street clothing. Materials were mixed up. Madonna softened the punk style with a softer and sexier look of nets, gloves and chiffon. Silk and harsh netting created the eighties glam look...
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies,
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)
Unfortunately, nearly all the “sights” in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers’ homes in the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy’s, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of “Didn’t he make a holy spectacle of himself?” An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
[W]e are all guilty in some Measure of the same narrow way of Thinking ... when we fancy the Customs, Dresses, and Manners of other Countries are ridiculous and extravagant, if they do not resemble those of our own.
—Joseph Addison (1672–1719)