Unlike the 2020s, a time when every blazer constructed for women seems to feature an excess of fabric, the essential silhouette had a far more structured and fitted look 40 years ago, in a far too often slept on era for fashion, the ’80s. Then, the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan at Dior, and Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel designed the now-favorite workwear piece not to look like menswear, but to accentuate a woman’s frame and sense of style, with hourglass tailoring, cropped-at-the-waist cuts, unexpected lapels, statement buttons, and bold color options that made each individual blazer feel like an outfit in and of itself.
In the last few months, ever since I went to a vintage store in Milan called Cavalli e Nastri and discovered a treasure trove of ’80s-era YSL Rive Gauche blazers inside, I’ve been perhaps a bit too obsessed with sourcing the French label’s nipped-in and cropped suiting and similar styles from other brands from the time on the secondhand market, setting up endless eBay and The RealReal alerts in order to get the best deals. And the more I search for them, the more often I see them elsewhere, on the streets of New York, in hidden vintage stores, and most frequently, on Instagram.
All this has lead me to the conclusion that while you shouldn’t get rid of every oversize blazer in your closet, it is time to make room for a different style—an older style—that, I know firsthand has the power to make any outfit feel more polished, more expensive, and more tuned in than any big, boxy alternative ever could. And to prove it to you, I gathered just about everything you could ever want to see relating to ’80s-era cropped, tailored blazers, from runway images of them from their heyday to modern Instagram adaptations. Scroll down to dig through it all.
Eliza Huber
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