The best part of Argo, a based-on-fact political thriller set in 1980, is its historically accurate stylings. The people we see have CRT televisions, corded phones, avacado-colored refrigerators, bushy haircuts and hippyish clothes. Ben Affleck looks great in his streaked-with-grey mop cut and droopy moustache, though the meticulously buffed torso he exposes at one point is decidedly anachronistic. I don’t think people back then, without trainers and pilates, had bodies like that.
Now that it’s standard practice, for both men and women, to wear one’s jeans low-slung, tight, and long, it’s particularly hilarious to see everyone in high-waisted flares. My companion laughed out loud when one gentleman appeared on screen sporting light blue bellbottoms with heavy topstitching that made a giant, upside-down “U” on his bottom. They overwhelmed any grace there was in his figure, swallowing his legs and midsection. What made men wear these kinds of trousers, that seem to us today so obviously unmanly? Was it androgyny? Or was the Carter era a less complicated, less conventional age, when both men and women felt free to wear anything they felt like, however unpretty it was?