Stars from the 80s – what’s their secret?

I don’t know whether it is because there has been a bit of an 80s resurgence recently, or whether it’s down to the amount of decade-spanning TV I have watched over the last few weeks, but I have noticed a disturbing effect - a number of artists from the 80s seem to look younger now than they did then. I have no idea how this is possible – even allowing for possible botox and plastic surgery, the youthful appearance of artists like Sinitta is something I find incomprehensible. Samantha Janus is another one - admittedly, her career missed the actual 80s by a couple of years, but the effect is the same. Having watched a couple of episodes of ‘Pie in the Sky’, a snippet of ‘Game On’ and then caught a glimpse of her in Eastenders, Samantha Janus’s apparent inability to age was apparent as never before. There have always been a range of people who just look better now than they used to – David Bowie, Mick Jagger - but I have always put that down to the fact that their stars were in the ascendant at a time when men’s fashion, particularly in the music industry was for a more androgynous, controversial look and having been brought up in the 80s I never fully appreciated that it was at one time considered attractive. But these age defying women are something of a mystery to me – the secret of the anti-ageing process seems to be that the 80s were a shockingly bad time for fashion. Between shoulder pads, fluorescent leggings and orange eye shadow, it seemed to have been an era where the fashion was designed to make everyone look hideous. There is no flattering way to wear leggings: they look like overly tight sausage skins on anyone with any spare flesh, somehow manage to look equally appalling when the wearer is so skinny that they leggings are actually baggy, and even on those with the perfect legs they are still a particularly unflattering way of demonstrating them. Why they became the must-have clothing item for a generation of sweating ecstasy fiends is beyond me, but I think it has helped those who have weathered the storm of the 80s ‘scene’ and emerged in the new millennium looking as though they have been sealed in tupperware for the last 15 years like that family in ‘Eerie Indiana’. The only man I can think of who approaches a similar phenomenon is Andy Peters, who just looks the same, and quite possibly will for the rest of his life, but having begun to ponder on the matter, I am sure that my brain will produce a selection of appropriately ageless males too. I will not be drawn on the Madonna issue – the very fact that the media seem to think that she is the only artist ever to have reached the age of fifty annoys me so intensely that I cannot begin to form a rational thought on whether she looks better now than she did then.