If there's one item that was as ubiquitous in the '80s as it is today, it's leggings. Alongside the aerobics craze of the decade, Spandex became a bona fide fashion trend—though back then, they were worn with leg warmers, off-the-shoulder sweatshirts, and/or scrunchies. For more professionally minded women, the broad-shouldered power suit became an office staple—and for good reason. As historian Bonnie English writes in A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th and 21st Centuries, "Women in professional careers used fashion as a political language to illustrate their expectations of power and position in the management structures of large corporations." If you were going to be shattering the glass ceiling, you might as well be wearing shoulder pads.
