60 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What two-word term describes the shoulder-padded look of 1980s career women?
Power dressing
The look coincided with women entering management in large numbers, 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
The show's costume designer Nolan Miller dressed the Carringtons in ever-bigger silhouettes, 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
The 'Sweats' line got young women back into miniskirts for the first time in a decade and made Velcro shoulder pads mainstream.
Q 05Besides lace gloves and tulle skirts, Madonna's 'Like a Virgin'-era imitators wore big jewelry in what shape?
Crucifixes
The look, much of it from London street designers, also included bras worn as outerwear and 'Boy Toy' belt buckles.
Q 06Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake brought deconstructed 'avant-garde' fashion West from where?
Japan
Their baggy, asymmetrical black clothes were a deliberate rejection of the decade's neon and body-con excess.
Q 07The Official Preppy Handbook, the tongue-in-cheek Ivy League style bible, came out in which year?
1980
Edited by Lisa Birnbach, it turned popped collars, boat shoes and sweaters tied around the shoulders into a national uniform.
Q 08Which TV series is credited with popularizing the T-shirt-under-Armani-jacket look for men?
Miami Vice
Don Johnson's sockless loafers, white linen trousers and permanent stubble came along for the ride.
Q 09Michael Mann banned which colour family from the wardrobe of his pastel 1980s cop show?
Earth tones
The rule came from an Art Deco revival, and designers Gianni Versace and Hugo Boss were consulted to keep the leads looking sharp.
Q 10Who 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 11For how much did Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' jacket sell at auction in 2011?
$1.8 million
Julien's Auctions handled the sale two years after Jackson's death.
Q 12The first twelve Swatch models were unveiled on 1 March 1983 in which city?
Zürich
The cheap plastic quartz watch was Switzerland's answer to the Japanese watches that had gutted its industry.
Q 13The name Swatch is a contraction of what?
Second watch
The idea was a low-cost, artistic watch you would buy in addition to a serious one, and then collect by the dozen.
Members Only jackets were sold with the slogan 'When you put it on, ___.'
Q 21Only 18,000 pairs of Wayfarers sold in 1981. How many sold in 1983, the year of the Tom Cruise placement?
360,000
The frames had been designed back in 1952 by Raymond Stegeman of Bausch & Lomb.
Q 22Which husband-and-wife team designed Lady Diana Spencer's 1981 wedding dress?
David and Elizabeth Emanuel
The ivory silk taffeta gown was decorated with 10,000 pearls and valued at about £9,000.
Q 23How long was the train on Diana's wedding dress?
25 feet
At 7.6 metres it was the longest train in royal wedding history at the time and barely fit in the glass coach.
something happens
The jackets, with their narrow epaulettes and collar strap, reached the US in 1980 via Europe Craft Imports.
Q 15The 1982 Reebok Freestyle, the first athletic shoe designed for women, was built for which activity?
Aerobics
The soft garment-leather shoe rode the exercise-class boom and made Reebok a giant almost overnight.
Q 16In which year did Reebok launch the Pump, the sneaker you inflated with a button on the tongue?
1989
By 1992 more than 100 professional athletes were wearing them.
Q 17The first Air Jordan sneaker went on public sale in which year?
1985
It hit stores on 1 April, a few months after Michael Jordan's rookie season began.
Q 18What was the NBA's per-game fine for shoes breaking its colour policy, the basis of Nike's 'banned' Air Jordan ad?
$5,000
Nike's ad claimed the league 'threw them out of the game', which turned out to be superb marketing.
Q 19The 1988 Air Jordan III introduced which logo?
The Jumpman
Tinker Hatfield's design also introduced elephant-print leather and kept Jordan from leaving Nike.
Q 20Tom Cruise sliding across the floor in Ray-Ban Wayfarers helped revive the sunglasses in which 1983 film?
Risky Business
The scene was part of a $50,000-a-year product-placement deal Ray-Ban had signed the year before.
Q 24Guess, the jeans brand launched in 1981, was started by four brothers with what surname?
Marciano
Georges, Maurice, Armand and Paul Marciano were Moroccan-born designers who built the brand on black-and-white ad campaigns.
Q 25In a controversial 1980 jeans ad, 14-year-old Brooke Shields asked what came between her and her ___?
Calvins
The answer, 'Nothing', made Calvin Klein's designer jeans a sensation and drew complaints to networks.
Q 26Before they became an 80s fashion item, leg warmers were worn by whom to stop muscles cramping?
Dancers
The films Fame, Xanadu and Flashdance and the exercise craze put them on everyone else.
Q 27In which year was Jane Fonda's Workout, the chart-topping leotard-and-leg-warmer video, released?
1982
The series went on to sell 17 million videos, and it was the first non-theatrical home video to top the charts.
Q 28Jelly shoes, the translucent sandals of the mid-80s, are made from which material?
PVC plastic
The name came from a Paris company called Jelly Shoes, and Bloomingdale's ordered 2,400 pairs in 1983 to start the US craze.
Q 29Which Italian jeans company patented the modern acid-wash process in February 1986?
Rifle
A Texas firm, American Garment Finishers, industrialized it in North America four months later and offered it to Levi Strauss.
Q 30Acid-washed denim is tumbled with pumice stones and what until it turns almost white?
Chlorine
The look was discovered by accident when someone ran jeans and bleach-soaked stones through a dry washing machine.