When the Eighties had to stop

The Eighties, you might say, didn’t end on time. The speculative financial boom in the United States and elsewhere, which became synonymous with the price of reputation and the importance of money, which began with the Ronald Reagan tax cut and the gloss of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, which rode out a crash in 1987 and rolled on through the soaring Nineties, the decade of Clinton, the Internet and the first billion-dollar movie, began to unravel only after the millennium, when share prices fell, when the US Department of Justice took two leading art auction houses to court, and when it was discovered that executives of a Texan company few people had ever heard of had committed an absolutely massive fraud, or around about then.

In New York, speculation continues, naturally enough: a Picasso was sold for $100 million at Sotheby’s the other day; property prices in Manhattan are sky-high; some people continue to follow celebrity news just as others track stock prices; there are Masters of the Universe in New York City. But the mood is over, the zeitgeist gone, and while there will always be the nostalgia merchants, parading their stories about just what a fabulous time they had and asking when will the good times roll again, the long-Eighties and a lot of what they stood for, is another time. Some might say about time, too.

Christopher Mason’s first book was a biography of Gianni Versace, the Italian fashion designer murdered in the long-Eighties hot-spot, South Beach, Miami. His clothes were very Eighties — gaudy and expensive — and his surname was often mispronounced: ‘the-sais’, in the voice of Victoria Gotti, daughter of the consummate Eighties New York mobster, the flash and so very public capo de mafia John Gotti.