14 Times GQ Covers Summed Up The '80s

Exclamation points because everyone's doing the cocaine!

The '80s! They were exciting! Especially for GQ magazine! Which epitomized flashy coke-fueled buzz words and the age of ’80s copywriting.

Style!

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The 1980s were all about style, but damned if you were allowed to be excited about it. Style is a very serious thing. If Jimmy Carter wasn't going to address the issue of style, then it was up to GQ.

Go West!

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Manifest Destiny wasn't just for the 1880s, it was for the 1980s too. If you weren't ready to look like a sexy Marlboro man (chomping on hay though, because cigarettes are gross but pass the cocaine thanks), then you weren't really serious about being a man.

California!

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A clarification of where to go when you "Go West!"

The Tops!

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The '80s were #masc before hashtags existed and shamed the bottoms and versatile gay men of the decade.

Power!

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This cover inspired the careers of every Gordon Gekko and Wolf of Wall Street.

Splash!

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True Story: Brian Grazer and Ron Howard saw this cover and immediately pitched a mermaid love story starring these two models. The models were killed at sea in a photo shoot turned murder-suicide, so they reluctantly had to go with casting Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in Splash.

Options!

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Life wasn't always easy in the '80s. Mt. St. Helen's erupted, Reaganomics terrorized America, and the Cold War chilled us to the bone. But never forget that as Americans, we had options!

Great Escapes!

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But if you ran out of options, then you just left the United States, I guess.

Earth!

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But don't go into space, stay on THIS planet. We were NOT our parents. Space was a cannabis-provoked fad of the swinging '60s.

The New Mood!

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What the '80s really needed was change. Be like John Travolta and toss out your go-to leading lady Olivia Newton-John for a non-Australian look-alike.

World Class!

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If you were black in the '80s, you were worldly! As in, you were from Africa, probably.

Warm! Heat! Sun!

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One thing's for sure, the '80s were HOT. They were WARM. They had HEAT. And when the '80s ran out of synonyms for hot, they just went with SUN!

Fashion Now!

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The leading civil rights movement of the '80s was fashion. You could hear the battle cry of "What do we want? Fashion! When do we want it? Now!" in every movie theater across America following screenings of Working Girl.

Manstyle!

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Sorry ladies, save your feminism for another decade. The '80s was about #AllMen and their Manstyle!