The eighties are back, but not the way they actually looked. Social media is full of AI-generated images selling their own version of the decade - gloss, neon, exaggeration. The real photographs from those years tell something calmer and, frankly, more wearable.

The formula is recognisable: padded shoulders, XL earrings, high-waisted jeans, an accentuated waist and volume in the hair. That was not decoration - it was architecture. Every piece had the job of holding the shape, not of drawing attention to itself.

Isabel Preysler in 1980, walking through Madrid with her daughter Tamara Falco, wore a light blue blouse with structured shoulders, a chocolate pencil skirt and shoes in the same tone. Gold jewellery, sculptural earrings, hair pulled back. Not one piece is fighting another - that is the difference between then and today's outfits.

Diana of Wales spent the same decade inside the tailoring. A jacket with pronounced shoulders and satin lapels, a knee-length skirt, a light blue polka-dot blouse as contrast, low-heeled shoes, gold earrings. The photograph from the Daffodil Awards in Swansea in 1989 is a good reminder that her style did not begin with the revenge dress.

Marta Chavarri, the it girl of her generation, lived in padded shoulders and pencil skirts. Nati Abascal went for monochrome looks - a white mini dress with structured sleeves and floral detailing, voluminous hair, oversized pearl earrings with green fringing. Caroline of Monaco in Paris in 1989 wore all black, with a sculptural collar and a coat whose leopard lining showed only when she moved.

That last one is the best styling lesson in the whole piece. The print was not on the outside of the coat. It appeared only when the person walked. Today that would be a post; back then it was a sign that somebody dressed for themselves, not for the camera.