Did you ever see the uproarious 1984 teen comedy Making The Grade starring Judd Nelson? Where a streetwise, sassy kid has to fit into a snobby preppy college? No? Well, it’s an awful movie, with predictable jokes and humor that may make you literally cringe.
But it is an amazing watch for prime 1984 preppy fashion. Usually Hollywood got preppy wrong, but a lot of things were right here.
The whole movie is available to watch, free:
First, the multilayered/ multi-collared thing. Yes, we used to wear polo shirts under collared long sleeve shirts. It still looks ok. In fact, fuck it – I am going to start doing this again. Since it’s a movie, they took it too far, and here our hero Judd goes crazy multi-collaring:
You can tell the bad guys (whoever Hollywood thinks is bad is actually good in real life) because they all wear awesome Shetland wool sweaters. Pipe smoking might have been still preppy in 1984 but was rapidly on it’s way out at that very moment.
When the preps were acting especially evilly, the Shetland sweaters would migrate to the shoulders. In the 80s this was not considered cool among the Connecticut youth and was thought of as an “old guy” thing to do, but Hollywood didn’t know that.
This green pants with white Lacoste polo looks really good (below); I am going to try to find where I can get pants in this color now. I will leave out the pink sweater draped over my shoulder because some things I still refuse to do.
A clash of two cultures. Will our streetwise guido-esque hero show up those snobby preps? Hopefully not. I don’t know what happens, I couldn’t make it to the end of the movie.
Nice pants bro (unironically)
The lacrosse stick is a perfect touch and tells us everything we need to know.
