80s Outfits for Men, Sorted by Which 80s You Mean

Ask ten people to picture a guy from the 80s and you'll get ten different guys. One has a pastel jacket on with the sleeves shoved up to the elbow. Another has his polo collar flipped up to his ears. There's a kid in sneakers with no laces, on purpose, and a guitarist whose hair is doing most of the talking. They all lived through the same decade, and none of them would have been caught dead in the others' clothes.

That's where most 80s outfit advice goes wrong. It throws the whole decade into one look: neon, a mullet, shoulder pads, a Walkman clipped to the belt. That's a costume. Nobody in 1986 dressed like the entire decade at once.

So pick a tribe first. There are nine below, each with what the originals actually wore and a version that works on a normal Tuesday, when nobody should be asking which party you're going to.

The Miami Vice guy

Miami Vice premiered on NBC on September 16, 1984, and its costume rules came from the top. According to costume designer Jodie Tillen, Michael Mann told her: "No earth tones, no red." So Sonny Crockett lived in pastel T-shirts under unstructured jackets from Armani, Hugo Boss and Cerruti, with light trousers and loafers. Don Johnson has said the rest was the weather. He pushed the sleeves up and skipped the belt and the socks because Miami was hot.

Keep the idea and skip the jacket when it's hot out. A camp collar shirt does the same job with less effort. The Crockett Shirt 1984 ($69.99) has the Ocean Drive hotels printed across it, and the Vercetti Shirt 1986 ($47.99) is our best seller, for reasons we get into in the camp collar guide. Wear either one open over a white tee, add square metal sunglasses like the Ocean Drive Sunglasses 1983 ($29.99), and stop there. The socks stay home. That part of the look was always right.

The preppy

Lisa Birnbach's The Official Preppy Handbook came out in October 1980 with a first printing of 7,500 copies. They sold out in a week, and a year later the book was still on the New York Times bestseller list. It was written as a joke about how old-money kids dressed, and a lot of readers used it as a shopping list instead. The uniform was a polo with the collar up if you felt brave, khakis or madras shorts, boat shoes without socks, and a sweater draped over the shoulders like a cape that gave up halfway.

Polo shirts and chinos never left, so this is the tribe you can wear without anyone clocking it as retro. Skip the popped collar unless you're in on the joke. The shoulder sweater is fine on a boat and a little strange in a grocery store.

The Wall Street guy

Gordon Gekko showed up in 1987 in clothes that were planned down to the collar. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick worked with menswear writer Alan Flusser. Martin Greenfield tailored the suits, Alexander Kabbaz made the shirts with their white contrast collars, and Michael Douglas cycled through a whole drawer of loud suspenders. Decades later, people still come up to Douglas to tell him Gekko is the reason they became stockbrokers, which suggests the villain part didn't land.

A contrast collar shirt is a strong move under a plain navy suit, or with chinos and no tie. Suspenders only work on trousers that sit at your real waist. With low-rise jeans they look like an accident. Finish it with a simple analog watch on a strap, like the Blue Ray Analog Watch ($19.99).

The B-boy

Run-DMC released "My Adidas" in May 1986. On July 19 that year, at Madison Square Garden, they asked the crowd to hold up their Adidas, and thousands of sneakers went into the air in front of an Adidas executive, Angelo Anastasio, whom co-manager Lyor Cohen had invited to the show. A few weeks later the group had a $1.6 million deal, which Guinness World Records lists as the first sneaker endorsement for non-athletes. The rest of the uniform was an Adidas tracksuit, Superstars with no laces and the tongues out, a Kangol like LL Cool J's, heavy Cazal frames like the ones DMC wore, and a gold rope chain heavy enough to double as a workout.

A track top over a plain tee and straight jeans still looks current. Keep the sneakers clean. If you want the color blocking without the full tracksuit, the Color Block Windbreaker 1984 ($79.99) gets you there, and the BoomBox Hoodie 1982 ($69.99) puts the boombox on your chest instead of your shoulder.

The new wave kid

Two different looks share this label, and people mix them up constantly. American new wave, the Talking Heads and The Cars end of things, meant skinny ties, narrow suits and short-sleeve shirts buttoned to the top (David Byrne's enormous suit in Stop Making Sense being the famous exception). The British New Romantics went the other way. When Duran Duran shot the "Rio" video on a yacht in 1982, they wore pastel silk suits by Antony Price, which is about as far from a skinny tie as a suit can get.

The skinny tie works for a night out: plain shirt, dark jacket, a tie about the width of a ruler. Add dark square frames like the Retro Square Sunglasses 1981 ($29.99) and you look more like an album cover than a job interview. The yacht suit is harder to pull off. You need the yacht.

The hair metal guy

On the Sunset Strip in 1987, somewhere between Mötley Crüe and Poison, the look was leather, patched denim vests, spandex and white high-tops, and a can of Aqua Net did more work than any jacket.

This one updates easily because the rock uniform has barely changed since. Black leather biker jacket, a faded tee from a band you can name three songs by, black jeans, boots. The Retro Biker Jacket 1984 ($89.88) is the piece to start with. The bandana is optional and has its own guide. Leave the spandex in 1987.

The skater

Jeff Spicoli was technically a surfer, but when Sean Penn wore checkerboard Vans slip-ons in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), the pattern went national, and skaters have worn it ever since. Add a skate brand or band tee, shorts, and tube socks pulled up with real conviction.

Today's version is slip-ons, a boxy tee, and shorts or straight chinos. It's cheap to put together, and it's still the most comfortable outfit on this page.

The movie hero

Two actors moved more menswear in the 80s than a lot of designers did. Tom Cruise wore Ray-Ban Wayfarers in Risky Business (1983), a model that had sold only about 18,000 pairs in 1981. In 1983 it sold 360,000. Three years later he put on aviators in Top Gun, and aviator sales went up about 40 percent. Michael J. Fox did it cheaper in Back to the Future (1985): a denim jacket, a red down vest over it, and a pair of Nike Bruins that were his own. It's also the movie where Marty's mother, in 1955, reads the label on his underwear and decides his name is Calvin Klein.

A bomber or a denim jacket is the most wearable thing in this whole article. The New Retro Bomber Jacket ($69.99) and the Retro Denim Jacket 1981 ($69.89) both use the decade's shapes, and if you're still deciding, our jacket comparison lines the bomber up against a windbreaker and a varsity. The red vest is your call.

The synthwave guy, who never existed

This one is a cheat. Nobody dressed like this in 1985. Synthwave is the 80s rebuilt from memory by people who grew up with VHS covers and, later, the soundtrack to Drive (2011): black, magenta and teal, neon on wet asphalt, the kind of jacket that looks right in a parking lot at 2 a.m. It's also the tribe we know best, since it's more or less our whole catalog.

Start with a dark printed shirt like the Retrowave Shirt 1985 ($39.99) and black jeans. Add the Synthwave Leather Jacket 1984 ($89.99) when it's cold. Then sneakers with a VHS tape on the side, which is a sentence nobody in 1985 saw coming. The VHS T-120 Sneakers 1988 ($109.99) are where we'd start.

How to wear any of this without looking like a costume

One loud piece per outfit. If the shirt is doing flamingos, the shoes do nothing. Keep the fit modern, because a 1985 cut in a 1985 color is where "retro" turns into a Halloween costume. And don't mix tribes. A Crockett jacket with laceless Superstars is how you end up looking like the whole decade again. There's more on this in our guide to dressing like it's 1986 without the costume.

If you're going to an actual 80s party, ignore every word of that. Mix all nine, add a headband, and go read our 80s party outfit guide.

Questions we get

What did most men actually wear in the 80s? Regular clothes. Jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts, windbreakers, sneakers, and quite often a Members Only jacket, a brand that had passed $100 million in sales by 1984. The tribes above were the loud minority, and they're the ones movies and music videos remember.

What's the easiest 80s look for a guy? The movie hero. A bomber or denim jacket over a T-shirt, with jeans, works almost anywhere and doesn't look like a theme.

What watch goes with an 80s outfit? A chunky digital or a colorful analog. The decade got both in the same spring: Swatch launched in March 1983 and Casio's G-Shock in April. G-Shock's engineer, Kikuo Ibe, tested his prototypes by dropping them out of a third-floor bathroom window. Our watch collection has both kinds.

Which sunglasses go with which tribe? Wayfarer shapes for preppy, new wave and the Risky Business look, aviators for Top Gun, square metal frames for Miami. Our sunglasses guide sorts them by face shape too.

Explore the collections: 80s Men's Fashion · 80s Men's Shirts · 80s Jackets & Windbreakers · VHS Sneakers