The RetroBlog

The Influence of Miami Vice has been so great that it is today considered amongst the most influential television series ever made, and many aspects of the show have become pop culture icons. Many of its concepts and techniques, such as its heavy integration of contemporary music and its cinematic filming style, have become standard in modern TV shows, while the series' fashion design had a direct influence on the lifestyle choices of the time.

Outrun is a 1980s-themed retrofuturistic visual art and music style associated with the electronic genres electro, synthwave, futuresynth, new retrowave and vaporwave. The style is named after the iconic 1986 arcade racing game Out Run.

In that perfectly postmodern way of our instantly nostalgic, Buzz-fed culture, Netflix’s Stranger Things plays on our loving remembrance of things that never really went away: ’80s horror films, Steven Spielberg, Winona Ryder, etc. The soundtrack creates the instantaneous feeling that you’re actually watching Stranger Things on an old-fashioned tube TV back in ’83, perhaps running concurrently with V: The Original Miniseries.

Does anybody still use the word ‘cool’ to describe something hip, swag or sick? We’re not sure, but having been set the challenge to name 40 cool cars from the 1980s, we grabbed our parachute pants, permed our hair and stuck some Wham on the Sony Walkman before making a list.

We’ve tried to avoid the obvious, choosing to concentrate on some forgotten gems.

As far as fashion goes, no decade is quite as no-no-notorious as the 80s. After all, in what other decade could you get away with wearing skin-tight pants one day and baggy “MC Hammer” pants the next? During what other time period could you wear leg warmers, a sweater and a miniskirt all at the same time (and in electric neon colors)? Take a walk down memory lane. Here are the top 10 80s fashion fads we used to love.

In all of these fads, color was the order of the day. The drab khakis, white and black of the 90s do not apply. Big color and color mixed in unusual ways (say, bright yellow with red) were considered totally tubular – to the max.

Synthwave is the all-encompassing genre of "music with synthesizer sounds". Retrowave is a sub-genre of Synthwave that is all about mimicking the styles made popular in the original 80s boom period. Retrowave has several sub-sub-genres under its umbrella, each focusing on one of those mimicked styles. The best way that I can separate them is by describing a scene and letting you imagine the soundtrack for it.

Ridley Scott's science fiction film hit cinemas in 1982, later earning die-hard fans. "Blade Runner 2049," to be released on October 6 in the US, links to this legacy. But what makes "Blade Runner" a cult hit today?

Perhaps more than any decade before or since, due largely to the home video market, the 1980s was a great time for cult films. Part of the attraction with these movies designated with cult status is that they are decidedly different and much more provocative than mainstream populist fare.

I am so thrilled about the return of ’80s culture as it’s one of my favorite eras of fashion, music and film. Nothing can beat a good over-sized suit jacket and platform shoes. The styles of David Bowie, Grace Jones and Annie Lennox are hard not to admire. It would be brave of anyone today to pull off what they wore back then. But, even the casual styles of ’80s rock stars and actors have infiltrated fashion today.

What Is the Future of Synthwave? There are no certainties in life, though the next few years hold several assurances for synthwave fans. These include the continued rise in prominence of cybersynth and darksynth and the continued integration of synthwave into mainstream pop.

The terms “synthwave” and “retrowave” are the modern names for the main genre, and they are used broadly when talking about the music. The two terms are roughly equivalent, though there’s a useful distinction between them.

Synthwave is a distinctly modern music genre begun in the mid 2000s as an homage to the pop culture sounds and imagery of the 1980s and early 1990s.