80s Fashion Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
58 free 80s Fashion trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
54 free 80s Fashion trivia questions with answers. The 1980s dressed louder than any decade before or since, and this quiz covers the whole wardrobe. Fifty-four questions run from power dressing and Dynasty shoulder pads to Madonna's lace gloves, Miami Vice pastels, Members Only jackets, Swatch watches, jelly shoes, leg warmers, acid-wash denim, the first Air Jordans and Reebok's aerobics shoe. The designers get their due too: Claude Montana, Norma Kamali, Karl Lagerfeld arriving at Chanel, Christian Lacroix's pouf, Donna Karan's seven easy pieces, Vivienne Westwood's Pirate collection, Azzedine Alaia, Katharine Hamnett's slogan tees and Dapper Dan's Harlem boutique. Easy questions ask which show made T-shirts under Armani jackets a thing; the hard ones want the ballet behind the mini-crini and the company that patented acid wash. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and brand histories, and each question carries the sentence that supports it, so you can settle arguments with confidence.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What two-word term describes the shoulder-padded look of 1980s career women?
Power dressing
Power dressing: the term took hold as women entered management in large numbers, with padded shoulders and tailored suits borrowed from menswear, and the wider the shoulder, the bigger the statement.
Q 02Joan Collins and Linda Evans helped make oversized shoulder pads a craze on which prime-time soap opera?
Dynasty
Dynasty's costume designer Nolan Miller dressed the Carringtons in ever-bigger silhouettes across the ABC soap's nine seasons from 1981, and the trend lasted into the early 1990s.
Q 03Which French designer was nicknamed 'the King of the Shoulder Pad'?
Claude Montana
Montana's exaggerated, almost armour-like shoulders are credited with defining the whole power-dressing era.
Q 04Norma Kamali's best-selling 1981-82 collection was made from which unlikely fabric?
Sweatshirt fleece
Sweatshirt fleece: Kamali's 'Sweats' line cut the grey gym fabric into rah-rah miniskirts, dresses and jumpsuits, and its removable Velcro shoulder pads helped push padding into the mainstream.
Q 05Besides lace gloves and tulle skirts, Madonna's 'Like a Virgin'-era imitators wore big jewelry in what shape?
Crucifixes
Crucifixes, often several at once, hung alongside stacks of rubber bracelets in a look styled by Maripol; it also took in lace gloves, bras worn as outerwear and the 'Boy Toy' belt buckle.
Q 06The Official Preppy Handbook, the tongue-in-cheek Ivy League style bible, came out in which year?
1980
The Official Preppy Handbook appeared in October 1980, edited by Lisa Birnbach, and turned popped collars, boat shoes and sweaters tied around the shoulders into a national uniform.
Q 07Which TV series is credited with popularizing the T-shirt-under-Armani-jacket look for men?
Miami Vice
Miami Vice dressed Don Johnson's Sonny Crockett in pastel T-shirts under unstructured Armani-style jackets, with sockless loafers, white linen trousers and permanent stubble coming along for the ride.
Q 08Michael Mann banned which colour family from the wardrobe of his pastel 1980s cop show?
Earth tones
Mann's rule was 'no earth tones': the palette came from Miami Beach's pastel Art Deco district, and labels such as Versace and Hugo Boss supplied clothes to keep the leads looking sharp.
Q 09Who designed the red-and-black jacket Michael Jackson wore in the 1983 'Thriller' video?
Deborah Nadoolman Landis
Landis, wife of the video's director John Landis, also designed Indiana Jones's outfit for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Q 10For how much did Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' jacket sell at auction in 2011?
$1.8 million
The jacket fetched $1.8 million at Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills in June 2011, two years after Jackson's death in June 2009.
Q 11The first twelve Swatch models were unveiled on 1 March 1983 in which city?
Zürich
Zürich hosted the launch on 1 March 1983; the cheap plastic quartz watch was Switzerland's answer to the Asian quartz imports that had gutted its watch industry in the 1970s.
Q 12The name Swatch is a contraction of what?
Second watch
'Second watch': Swatch chairman Nicolas Hayek's line was that it was a low-cost, artistic watch you bought in addition to a serious one, then collected by the dozen.
Q 13How did Members Only finish its slogan 'When you put it on, …'?
something happens
'Something happens' completed the line; the jackets, with narrow epaulettes and a collar strap, reached the US at the start of the decade via Europe Craft Imports.
Q 21Which husband-and-wife team designed Lady Diana Spencer's 1981 wedding dress?
David and Elizabeth Emanuel
David and Elizabeth Emanuel, a young London couture couple, made the ivory silk taffeta gown, which was decorated with 10,000 pearls and sequins and valued at about £9,000.
Q 22How long was the train on Diana's wedding dress?
25 feet
The train ran 25 feet (7.6 metres), the longest in British royal wedding history at the time, and had to be crammed into the glass coach for the ride to St Paul's.
Q 23Guess, the jeans brand launched in 1981, was started by four brothers with what surname?
Marciano
Q 14The 1982 Reebok Freestyle, the first athletic shoe designed for women, was built for which activity?
Aerobics
Aerobics: the soft garment-leather Freestyle rode the exercise-class boom and, with its high-top sister the Freestyle Hi, made Reebok a giant almost overnight.
Q 15In which year did Reebok launch the Pump, the sneaker you inflated with a button on the tongue?
1989
The Pump arrived in late 1989 at about $170, with an inflatable bladder you pumped up via a basketball-shaped button on the tongue; Dee Brown pumped his up before winning the 1991 NBA dunk contest.
Q 16The first Air Jordan sneaker went on public sale in which year?
1985
The Air Jordan I hit stores on 1 April 1985, a few months after Michael Jordan's rookie season with the Chicago Bulls began in October 1984.
Q 17What was the NBA's per-game fine for shoes breaking its colour policy, the basis of Nike's 'banned' Air Jordan ad?
$5,000
The fine was reportedly $5,000 a game, which Nike happily paid; its ad said the league had 'thrown them out of the game', though the shoe actually banned was the Nike Air Ship.
Q 18The 1988 Air Jordan III introduced which logo?
The Jumpman
The Jumpman silhouette debuted on the Air Jordan III; Tinker Hatfield's design also introduced elephant-print leather and is credited with keeping Jordan from leaving Nike.
Q 19Tom Cruise's Ray-Ban Wayfarers helped revive the sunglasses in which 1983 film?
Risky Business
Risky Business put Cruise in Wayfarers on its poster and through much of the film, part of a $50,000-a-year product-placement deal Ray-Ban had signed with Unique Product Placement the year before.
Q 20How many pairs of Wayfarers sold in 1983, the year of the Tom Cruise placement?
360,000
Sales hit 360,000 pairs in 1983, up from just 18,000 two years earlier; the frames had been designed back in 1952 by Raymond Stegeman of Bausch & Lomb.
Georges, Maurice, Armand and Paul Marciano were Moroccan-born designers who built the brand on black-and-white ad campaigns.
Q 24In a controversial 1980 jeans ad, 14-year-old Brooke Shields asked what came between her and her ___?
Calvins
'Nothing' came between her and her Calvins, the line that made Calvin Klein's designer jeans a sensation and drew complaints that led some stations to pull the spots.
Q 25Before they became an 80s fashion item, leg warmers were worn by whom to stop muscles cramping?
Dancers
Dancers wore them in rehearsal to keep calf muscles warm and loose; the films Fame, Xanadu and Flashdance and the exercise craze then put them on everyone else.
Q 26In which year was Jane Fonda's Workout, the chart-topping leotard-and-leg-warmer video, released?
1982
Jane Fonda's Workout came out in April 1982 and went on to sell 17 million copies, the first non-theatrical home video to top the charts.
Q 27Jelly shoes, the translucent sandals of the mid-80s, are made from which material?
PVC plastic
PVC plastic: the soft, translucent vinyl could be moulded in any colour and often glittered; a 1983 Bloomingdale's order is credited with starting the US craze.
Q 28Which Italian jeans company patented the modern acid-wash process in February 1986?
Rifle
Rifle patented the process in February 1986; American Garment Finishers of El Paso, Texas, industrialized it in North America four months later and offered it to Levi Strauss.
Q 29Acid-washed denim is tumbled with pumice stones and what until it turns almost white?
Chlorine
Chlorine bleach soaked into pumice stones does the work: the look was found by accident when jeans and bleach-soaked stones were tumbled in a machine without water, stripping the indigo in patches.
Q 30Whose 1986 song 'My Adidas' led to the first endorsement deal between a musical act and an athletic company?
Run-DMC
Run-DMC's track from Raising Hell celebrated laceless shell-toes; an Adidas executive watched a Madison Square Garden crowd hold their sneakers aloft, and the million-dollar deal followed.