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"Hey Upper East Siders...time to talk Gossip Girl fashion. Last night&amp;#x27;s episode took a trip back in time to one of style&amp;#x27;s most controversial decades through a young Lily Van Der Woodsen, and I want to know what you thought... I was born in 1981, which means I spent most of the decade in elementary school, but I was always a pretty precocious kid and I devoted plenty of time to fashion--slap bracelets, scrunched-down Wigwam socks, stonewashed jeans, black rubber &amp;quot;Madonna&amp;quot; bracelets, jellies, Jams, banana clips, Camp Beverly Hills, Benetton rugby shirts, Swatch watches, and, last but surely not least...the crimper! So I was especially excited to see how my favorite costume designers of the moment would treat the era of excess (reports say that Meredith Markworth-Pollack handled the costumes for both this episode and the upcoming still-untitled spinoff about Lily and Rufus in their youth--and that she watched hours of 80s movies for inspiration!). I was not disappointed. Given that Lily was a child of total privilege (BTW--I think Brittany Snow was brilliantly cast, don&amp;#x27;t you!?) her argyle sweaters and classic riding boots and tweed blazers were perfect, their references somewhere between Blair from The Facts of Life and at least three of the Heathers. And when it came to her wild child transformation, ripped from her older sister&amp;#x27;s New Wave closet, I couldn&amp;#x27;t believe both its accuracy (remember those lace-inset leggings? I had a white pair with lace trim at the bottom!) and its relevance today. Her peak-shoulder blazer could have been ripped straight from the runway of Martin Margiela, while her tiered animal print dress was an example of Balmania at its finest. Maybe this new spinoff is coming around at just the right time, when our collective passion for 80s fashion has never been more intense. What did you girls think? Did the clothes remind you of stuff you used to wear in the 80s? Do you think they got it right? And are you surprised at how very trendy (for 2009) some of it managed to look? What were some of your own best-loved trends of the 80s? Share! PLUS: Find out which Gossip Girl made my list of the 9 best dressed TV characters of all time! Add glamour.com to your Google homepage Follow Slaves to Fashion on Twitter! Photos: courtesy of the CW"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/fashion/blogs/dressed/2009/05/fashion-flashback-did-last-nig>