Disco

In the eighties, when I grew up, disco was still around. Punk didn't entirely kill it, and the fashions lingered (and continue to linger) to inspire us all.

The girls on the cover of records, the girls in ads in "Rolling Stone," the girls walking down the hallways in my high school, wore flashy clothes. Rainbow colors, a remnant of the late '60s, but influenced by a club-inflected gay aesthetic that (I think) started in New York and infultrated photography, advertising, and slowly television.

They were colorful, and loose some places and tight other places. There were no mid-drifts or tattoos. MTV wasn't around then, so a rock star couldn't wear something crazy in a video to start a fad. Fashion was more organic. It had to work to permeate our consciousness, the images we saw, the stores so we could buy it.

The '80s were a sexy time, and exhibitionism was different. There was no internet, there was only cable. Nudity was around but you had to work for it. Sneak to your friend's house to watch R-rated tit movies after 11:00 pm. You saw actors on your television nude, never your neighbors, never the girl next door. (Or people pretending to be your neighbors, next door.)

So fashion was more suggestive. It remained farther from actual sex than it is now. Now maybe it's too close.

I grew up with those flashy polyester-inflected clothes firing my imagination. Bathing suits that were cut in interesting ways to emphasize the girl's body... but not a sexual pose per se (yeah, right). Lights and arms posed perfectly. To convince us that it was art, not porn. I can't believe what was published in the old days in magazines.

How provocative it was for this 15-year-old back then.

One would look at the people around them, and try to imagine them naked. The tight Angel Flight pants on all the girls would flatten their stomach right above their pubic area, and the zipper would travel from the crotch up 6 inches to their navel. The pants hugged their hips, and framed the butt up the waist, didn't merely sit low to confound your imagination - and I had a different idea and fantasy image of a naked woman before I would be able to explore further, of how a woman was really built.

That smooth curve from thigh to hip to stomach to pussy to ass to back to ribs and around again. That beautiful curve around her hips and low into her pubis, moving across, all together in concert. Now I think we are too focused on the details, the gynocological inserts. I know now how the whole arrangement works together.

The '80s fashions hid the details, for the sake of putting it together in a whole package. The legs and the hips together, part of the entire carriage. Not only the parts. Only the butt. ("Pink.") Or the pussy (camel-toes). When a woman walked into the room, her entire torso moved with her, chest and legs, and she was bisected in 2 rather than fragmented into small sexual details.

All to a breathing, throbbing disco beat.

I watched those legs and those thighs sit down, turn, and step up stairs a hundred times, wondering what wonders were hidden within those tight, tailored and perfectly fitting high-waist Angel Flights.