Shoulder pad (fashion)

McCardell's innovative response was to put them in with very simple stitching so that they could be easily removed by the wearer, prefiguring the flexibility of the velcro-fastened shoulder pads of the 1980s.

[24] The following year, British designer Molyneux also eliminated shoulder pads,[25] part of a prophetic trend in high fashion that would be carried further by Balenciaga in 1945[26] and culminate in Dior's slope-shouldered 1947 Corolle collection.

"[citation needed] During this period, stiff, felt-covered cotton batting was the material used for most shoulder pads, a combination that allowed for easy adjustment[29] but didn't hold its shape very well when washed.

[39][40] Shoulder pads made their next appearance in women's clothing in the early 1970s, through the influence of British fashion designer Barbara Hulanicki and her label Biba.

[41] During the first five years of the 1970s, a number of designers in other fashion capitals also presented padded shoulders with an explicit 1940s inspiration, constituting a minor trend that peaked in 1971.

[66][67][68][69] During the mid-1970s, Saint Laurent and a few others did show an occasional padded-shoulder jacket scattered among the popular ethnic and peasant looks, but sensibly-proportioned, easy, and contemporary in appearance instead of being part of a forties look,[70][71][72] suitable for the standard officewear women were preferring as they entered the workforce in greater numbers during the decade,[73][74] a look codified with the 1977 publications of John T. Molloy's The Woman's Dress for Success Book and Michael Korda's Success!.

The first, favored by Paris designers like Saint Laurent,[88] Karl Lagerfeld for Chloé,[89] Thierry Mugler,[90] Claude Montana,[91] Pierre Cardin,[92][93] Jean-Claude de Luca,[94][95] Anne Marie Beretta,[96] France Andrevie,[97] and a number of others, was an explicit but exaggerated 1940s-revival silhouette[98][99] based largely on tailored suits and dresses, though more a slim-skirted haute couture forties look than the flared-skirt, World War II Utility Suit-inspired shapes flirted with by Saint Laurent in the early seventies,[100] no platform shoes or snoods this time.

[110][111] The second was a more contemporary sportswear look in which shoulder pads were added to easy but slimmed-down casualwear, favored largely by US[112] and Italian designers like Perry Ellis,[113][114] Norma Kamali,[115] Calvin Klein,[116] and Giorgio Armani.

[117][118] This time, the shoulder line was usually continuous from outer edge to neck, without the dip toward the center seen in the 1940s, and the pads used, even when enormous, were much lighter and held their shape better than the ones used in the 1940s,[119] now most often made of foam and other lightweight, well-shaped, moldable materials.

[120] As shoulder pads hadn't been this common in womenswear in decades, some in the fashion industry worried that the tailoring skills necessary for them had been lost and measures were taken to train workers in their proper placement.

[142][143][144][145] Ralph Lauren continued with his familiar English country classics[146] and devoted his fall 1978 collection to a cowboy theme, his shoulders the same size they had been in previous seasons.

Ungaro would also only resist the new broad-shoulders trend for a season or two, during which he continued to show the easy, seventies Soft Look/Big Look,[150] before enthusiastically adopting big-shoulder styles in 1979[151] and making the look his signature the following decade.

Thus, there was a removal of shoulder pads and other internal structuring during the easy, oversized, unconstructed Big Look or Soft Look era of the mid-seventies,[153] spearheaded in womenswear by Kenzo Takada in 1973-74[154][155] and in menswear by Giorgio Armani a couple of years later.

[161][162][163] The shoulder pad helped define the silhouette[164] and continued to be made in the cut foam versions introduced in the fall 1978 collections,[165] especially in well-cut suits reminiscent of the World War II era.

These styles had initially been resisted by the public at their 1978 introduction,[166][167][168] but designers continued to present exaggerated shoulder pads into the eighties so that they saturated the market and women did come to adopt them, with everyone from television celebrities to politicians wearing them.

[197] Ungaro became perhaps the most commercially successful of the Paris designers of the period[198][199] by maximizing the use of seductive-looking shirring, ruching, and draping[200] in large-shouldered dresses and suits,[201][202] reintroducing a Schiaparelli-era trend of Edwardian revival.

[203][204] Donna Karan, who had achieved fame in the 1970s as one of the designers behind the Anne Klein label, opened her own house in the mid-eighties, specializing in versatile separates for working women as she had in the seventies, but with eighties-style big shoulder pads[205] and more formal glamor added to conform to the times.

[240] During a brief general designer return to a sort of mid-seventies style of long dirndl skirts and shawls for Fall 1981,[241][242][243] most shoulders remained broad and padded,[244] very unlike the seventies.

All of this had an effect on the public, so that by the end of the era, some mass-market shoulder pads were the size of dinner plates and people were no longer shocked by them as they had been at their 1978 introduction.

"[253][254] Yves Saint Laurent had initiated the eighties big-shoulder trend in January 1978 and had been a shoulder-pad stalwart throughout the intervening years, but in 1988 even his shoulders, while still padded,[255] had been noticeably narrowed.

[271] The public and retailers, though, had embraced shoulder pads wholeheartedly by the end of the decade, feeling that they filled out their form[272][273] and gave clothes a more saleable "hanger appeal.

[290] By the end of the eighties, there was a fad for often brightly colored sport jackets with big shoulders worn over deep-cut, also often brightly colored muscle tank tops or string tank shirts, or even no shirt at all, letting a well-worked-out torso show[291] and sometimes allowing the shoulder-padded jacket to slide off the wearer's own chiseled shoulder, a style that would continue into the early nineties.

The shoulder pad fashion carried over from the late 1980s with continued popularity in the early 1990s, but wearers' tastes were changing due to a backlash against 1980s culture.

[292] Some designers continued to produce ranges featuring shoulder pads into the mid-1990s, as shoulder pads were prominent in women's formal suits and matching top-bottom attire, highly exemplified in earlier episodes of The Nanny from 1993 and 1994, where costume designer Brenda Cooper outfitted star Fran Drescher in things like late-eighties-style square-shouldered jackets by Moschino and Patrick Kelly.