Forever plaid

Thanks to Carl I've been thinking more about preppie, which I blogged on last week. I don't have time right now for extensive analysis, but it seems to me the preppie fad of the very early 1980s had a lot to do with the last gasps of disco and the counterculture: after all that excess, bland, expensive predictability had a lot of appeal. Reagan captured this mood perfectly.

(I may just have Reagan on the brain since Ereck and I caught up with the TV movie The Reagans this weekend--you know, the controversial one from last year starring James Brolin and Judy Davis, the one CBS yanked. (Four stars to the movie, by the way. Judy Davis is a genius. I don't, however, recommend the Madison public library's DVD. It has issues.))

Apropos of preppie and other early 1980s fads, I wanted to share this page from my fifth grade yearbook (Suzanne Cobb, ed., The Chalice (American Yearbook Co., 1982), 13). At the time, I went to Goodpasture, a fundamentalist Christian K-12 in Nashville, Tenn., so the page is about high schoolers and their fashions. The slipshod yearbook layout is priceless, as is the quaint approach to copyediting.