I Was Quite a Fashion Victim

The Grim Reaper in The '70s: "I can't believe I thought that looked good. I must have been high."

Mr. Incredible: I didn't know you had a bike!
Elastigirl: Hey, I had a mohawk. There's a lot about me you didn't know.
Mr. Incredible: Yeah, but... a mohawk?
Elastigirl: Eh, you didn't miss anything.

— Incredibles 2

When an out-of-fashion, embarrassing outfit or haircut is spoofed In-Universe.

People can get caught up in the fashions of a certain time, and just cringe thinking about it later on. This can be any time, but usually it's about the decades immediately before most present-day works. So in The '90s and the early 2000s, The '70s and The '80s were the most popular subjects for this, but now those later decades are slowly becoming this.

Sometimes it's the character acknowledging how silly they looked, but just as often it's their friends laughing at how dumb they used to look and that character not denying it, or we see the character back then and get a good laugh out of it.

Often shown during a home video, Embarrassing Old Photo or Flashback, where the trope can overlap with the Funny Flashback Haircut if the hairstyle was at least suitable for that age.

This is virtually universally Truth in Television for people looking back on their younger days, especially if they're experimenting with finding their own styles or if they're part of a subculture. Remember, people: whatever fashions you think are cool/hip/trendy/stylish today will eventually look ridiculous to future generations and/or yourself some years later.

Compare Old Shame, Fashion Dissonance, Condemned by History, Outdated Outfit, Impossibly Tacky Clothes, and Fake Fabric Fashion Faux Pas. Contrast Former Teen Rebel, where the character's former behavior is seen as embarrassing. Costume Backlash is its Real Life counterpart.

Contrast I Was Quite a Looker (when a character looked better in the past).

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In-Universe Examples Only

Audio Plays

• In one of the Fifth Doctor's Big Finish audio plays, There's No Place Like Home (which came as a free gift with Doctor Who Magazine), he actively tries to keep Erimem from seeing the velvet jackets and frilled shirts of his third incarnation, and is mortified when she discovers them.

Comedy

• Denis Leary notes that drugs had to be the reason for platform shoes and bellbottoms. Though he also notes that people born after the '70s may not understand just how hard it was to find clothes on sale that didn't look like that. Clothing like that goes on sale (with big discounts) for a reason.
  Denis: There we were in the middle of a sexual revolution, wearing clothing that guaranteed we wouldn't get laid.
• Jeff Dunham starts his Controlled Chaos show with a photo gallery of himself in some horribly tacky outfits. Even he has no idea what the hell he was thinking with some of them.
  "I must've walked into the store and said, 'Do you have any pants that don't even go with themselves?'"

Comic Books

• Superheroes in general get this a lot thanks to the long-running nature of comic books, although how much of it is the characters or the writers is up to debate. An especially famous case happened to Black Canary, who, after a stint with a cringe-worthy costume, actually set it on fire on the cover of an issue.◊ In an issue of Birds of Prey she and Oracle go to a mall. Upon seeing a display of dolls featuring her '80s costume and having the clerk explain that they can't even sell the things, she buys up all of them so that no one else can see how bad it looked.
• Silk Spectre II mentions it in Watchmen.
• Dick Grayson from Batman does this a lot, with regards to both his scaly green underoo Robin costume and his first, disco-ish Nightwing costume, though Depending on the Writer he doesn't actually see anything wrong with the latter.
• There's a reason Luke Cage just wears a T-shirt and jeans these days. Take this exchange from Cable & Deadpool:
  Deadpool: Did I mention I was a huge fan of the yellow silk shirt and chains?
  Luke: Me too. Drawback: couldn't even shout-out all the bloodstains.
• In an issue of the '90s Wonder Man series, Wondy makes a list of his top ten villains. Number 2 was "everyone who's designed one of my previous costumes."
• Discussed in Savage Wolverine #12: Kitty Pryde is teaching a class on costume design at the Jean Grey Institute, and shows off her old costumes, including the Impossibly Tacky Sprite costume (gold lame, leg warmers, and roller skates!). One student, Quentin Quire, razzes her for it, and she simply notes "It was a more innocent time." Mind you, Quentin's pink fauxhawk isn't exactly timeless...
• Iron Man tries really hard to forget the time he gave his helmet a nose, and sometimes also when he had built-in rollerskates in his armor.
• In IDW's authorized comic book Doctor Who: The Forgotten, the Tenth Doctor and Martha discover a museum exhibit displaying several of the Doctor's past looks. Martha's reaction to Six's jacket: "Were you trying out for Joseph?"
• In the 2017 Runaways series, Nico and Karolina tease each other about their former fashion sense, with Karolina asking if Nico could possibly have been a sadder goth kid and Nico asking if Karolina could possibly have been a crunchier hippie.
• Justice Society of America: The superhero formerly known as Nuklon thinks this of his Infinity, Inc. era mohawk and codename, though he admits that the rest of the outfit was alright (or at least his first outfit). It's one of the reasons he changes his name to Atom-Smasher (also to pay homage to his godfather, Al Pratt, the Golden Age Atom).

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: While we never see what is in the picture Calvin is looking at, apparently in college his dad wore a "Party Naked" T-shirt and his mom looked like a "bimbo." (Bill Watterson himself claims that college yearbooks should have statutes of limitations.)
• Zits:
  • In one strip, Jeremy asks his dad Walt what he was like at 15. Apparently, he had a large poofy afro, bell-bottom pants, ridiculously tacky jacket and shirt, and had braces and granny glasses. Oh, and he played the clarinet. The image scares Jeremy enough it gets rid of his hiccup.
  • In another, earlier strip, Jeremy is flipping through an old photo album, and discovers that Walt apparently used to be a birthday clown. Jeremy actually thinks it's pretty funny, and tells his dad his old costume was hilarious. Connie points out that it's really a photo of Walt at a wedding in 1974. The outfit included an afro, a huge moustache, bellbottom pants, giant-collared jacket, unbuttoned shirt and a tacky medallion necklace.
  Walt: You know that and I know that...

Fanfic

• In Kara of Rokyn, Kara thinks her former costume, which included a 80's-style headband, looked ridiculous (which it is because she ditched it after a while):
  She also wore a version of her old Supergirl outfit, blue skirt and all. The headband from her last outfit had been abandoned long ago. It might have been intended as an equality statement, since men were traditionally only headband wearers, but after a while she just thought it looked stupid.
• In Getting Back on Your Hooves, Rarity's mother Pearl mentions what fashion was like when she was a teenager while bonding with Rarity by invoking this trope. Rarity's reaction?
  Rarity: The horror...
• Invoked by Yondu from we're jerry springer, not casablanca. when Peter sees old photos of Yondu and his friends from The 80s, which include Yondu with a bright red mohawk and a denim vest.
• RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse: During a crossover between the Lunaverse and the regular FIM universe, Celestia and the two Lunas pass times recounting differences between universes, eventually getting to ridiculous fashions. Celestia shows off a photo of her from the Era of Powdered Wigs (the logic being that a wig had to be at least as big as the horn of the pony it was sitting on). The Lunaverse Luna brings up the time everypony wore neck ruffs, with hers being so big she couldn't actually get through doors with it on. Seeing this reduces FIM Luna to laughter, deciding maybe a thousand years locked up in the moon wasn't so bad after all.

Film — Animated

• In Incredibles 2, Helen "Elastigirl" Parr admits to having once sported a mohawk.
  Helen: There's a lot about me you didn't know.
  Bob: Yeah, but — a mohawk?
  Helen: Eh, you didn't miss anything.

Film — Live-Action

• Dead Poets Society: Some of Professor Keating's students show him an old yearbook from when he was still a student, asking him what the "Dead Poets Society" was. Keating is suitably horrified at his yearbook photo.
  Keating: Thank you for this trip down amnesia lane. [hands them back the yearbook] Please burn this.
• The Wood Narrator Mike laughs when he sees a photograph of himself, Slim and Roland when they were teenagers, posing for the camera.
  Mike: It's hard to believe we dressed like this and thought it was cool.

Literature

• In The Berenstain Bears and the Dress Code, most of the students are trying stranger and stranger clothing styles, including one wearing a tiny miniskirt that prompts Miss Glitch to send her home to change. This prompts vice-principal Mervyn "Bullhorn" Grizzmeyer to try to institute a school dress code, which the students promptly rebel against through Loophole Abuse, up until Mr. Grizzmeyer sets the rules as "If I don't like your outfit, you go home and change". The matter is ultimately settled by a public debate with Mr. Grizzmeyer, Miss Glitch and Papa Bear on one side and the cubs on the other, which the cubs (Brother in particular) win without saying a single word: they simply show three slides they got from Grizzly Gran (Papa's mother), Mrs. Grizzmeyer (Mr. Grizzmeyer's wife) and Miss Glitch's mother of the adult trio in various bizarre outfits, including Papa wearing bellbottoms and Mr. Grizzmeyer in a zoot suit and a wide-brimmed hat. The dress code is promptly discontinued, and having made their point, the students largely abandon their stranger outfits for more normal ones.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • In the "Power of the Daleks" novelisation, the Second Doctor (on first regenerating) starts going through his jewelry box and finds a large earring, telling Ben and Polly that he used to wear it when he was younger. "Very fashionable once."
  • In the book The Roots of Evil, the Fourth Doctor encounters a statue of his Eleventh self and despairs that he will someday think wearing a bow tie is a good idea, insisting that he hates them and that they are not cool.
• The Dresden Files: In Death Masks, Harry Dresden remembers one of his own fashion choices and why he's the last person to judge Molly Carpenter on her current outfit as a result.
  I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.
• Miss Marple: Briefly mentioned in A Murder Is Announced — Miss Blacklock's niece Julia mentions being amused by pictures of Miss Blacklock as a young woman in the fashions of The Roaring '20s. Julia's brother remarks that in thirty years' time, it'll be Julia's turn to cringe at what she's wearing now.

Live-Action TV

• Cordelia from Angel, while studying her own photo album to get over her amnesia:
  Cordelia: Hmmm. Cute... [flip] cute... [flip] hot... [flip to egregious afro haircut] Yikes!!
  • Angel himself sported a rather horrifying mullet (yes, mullet) in the seventies. He's still a residual fanboy of Barry Manilow.
• Subverted in Better Off Ted. A flashback to Phil's first day shows Phil with long hair and a tie-dye shirt and Lem with an afro and purple glasses. Then Lem says, "It's too bad your first day had to be during Sixties Week."
• On Black Lightning (2018), Jennifer is trying out ideas for her own superhero costume with Gambi helping. Gambi shows off Jefferson's first Black Lightning suit (which looks just like the one from the comics with everyone laughing.
  Jennifer: Dad went out in public like that?
  Annisa: George Clinton called and asked for it back.
• Bones has one episode in which Cam is revealed to have been an actress in a B movie called "Invasion of the Mother Suckers", that she acted in to pay for med school while she was in New York. In the movie, she plays a vampire who looks like a beatnik Pam Grier. When her colleagues track down a copy of the film, she is understandably mortified.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a field day with this one whenever it shows the incredibly stoic Cpt. Holt in the '80s, it's almost always an excuse to put Andre Braugher into the most ridiculous costumes imaginable.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Buffy sees her mother's yearbook photo:
  Buffy: Mom, I've accepted that you've had sex. I'm not willing to accept that you had Farrah hair.
• In the first episode of The Chris Rock Show, Chris Rock claims he's actually the second Chris Rock, much like how there were two Lionels on The Jeffersons. He shows a picture of "the original Chris", which is a picture of himself with a Jheri curl hairdo.
• Community: In an election for school president, Jeff runs against Annie for the sole purpose of showing her what a hollow sham politics is — on the last debate she holds him up to ridicule by showing his audition tape for MTV's The Real World where he dresses up, sings, and dances like George Michael.
  Jeff: [defensively] I was, like, nineteen!
  Annie: We've all been nineteen, Jeff; we didn't do this!
• Emily Prentiss in Criminal Minds is revealed to suffer badly from this in one of the more hilarious moments of the series.
  Garcia: You're seriously trying to tell me you don't remember rocking that look?
  Reid: Perhaps your lack of recognition stems from a dissociative fugue suffered in adolescence. Say, at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert?
• Doctor Who: The Doctor has made all sorts of short-sighted fashion decisions over the years, making this a frequent theme whenever they recall past behavior or two incarnations meet:
  • When the Seventh Doctor debuts in "Time and the Rani", having finally shed the Sixth Doctor's... interesting... clothing, he remarks "I'm glad to see I've returned to a sense of haute couture."
  • In the 1993 "The Power of the Daleks" audio reconstruction, with narration provided by the Fourth Doctor, he audibly cringes when recalling his decision to go around wearing the First Doctor's clothes, even though they no longer fit him:
    The Doctor: I looked like a clown. I will never understand why I thought this ensemble was acceptable garb for a Time Lord.
  • In some of the Official Fan-Submitted Content about the Ninth Doctor on Clive's Character Blog, the Ninth Doctor is reported to have been spotted at the dump throwing away frilly shirts, long scarves and a multicoloured coat in the name of "a clear-out".
  • In the charity special "Time Crash", the Tenth Doctor is delighted with Five's cricket gear, but has a harder time complimenting the stick of celery. "But fair play to you; not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable."
  • In "The Day of the Doctor", the Eleventh Doctor snipes at the Tenth Doctor's "sand shoes" and even remarks negatively on his taste in TARDIS décor, saying it was his "grunge phase" and telling the War Doctor that he'll grow out of it.
  • In "Deep Breath", the Twelfth Doctor announces that he needs a new outfit with a really long scarf, then quickly changes his mind about the scarf because it'd look stupid — although not because the scarf itself looks stupid, but because the look is too young for him to pull off (the Fourth Doctor was about 750, and the Twelfth is over 2000).
  • In "Time Heist", the Twelfth Doctor allows a psychic alien to feast on his memories, telling it, "Big scarf... bow tie... embarrassing."
  • Inverted in ""The Three Doctors", where the First Doctor is rather disgruntled to find out that he will be quite a fashion victim in future, bluntly dismissing Three and Two respectively as "a dandy and a clown".
• In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air the whole family sees Phil and Vivian on an episode of Soul Train sporting afros and bellbottoms and other wacky '70s styles.
• Friends did this any time (mainly with Chandler and Ross) there was a flashback to when they were teens or in college:
  • Ross spent much of his time in college looking like a white Lionel Richie.
  • Chandler sported A Flock of Seagulls hair and once entered a Vanilla Ice look-alike competition and won (Ross entered too, but he only came in fourth).
  • And in one of the Thanksgiving flashback episodes, Ross and Chandler turn up dressed like Sonny Crockett, complete with nonsensical posing and rolling up their sleeves. They also acknowledge their previous looks as embarrassing, failing to realize that they still look ridiculous.
• Tim and Jill on Home Improvement dig up some old photos out of the basement. Their kids are shocked to learn that that one picture of a very attractive young woman is actually of their mother, and the attractive young man she's with is... some guy who isn't Tim. The picture they eventually dig up of Tim has him wearing a dorky '70s mustache.
• In How I Met Your Mother
  • Lily says of her homecoming picture "the bangs were a mistake" — and then when we flash back to her prom, we see she wasn't kidding. Ted also had incredibly curly hair back in college.
  • Barney in his past, far from being the Sharp-Dressed Man he is in the present, was a long-haired hippie. He's mocked considerably for it.
  • Robin takes the cake with this one — as it's revealed that she was a Teen Idol in her youth. She sported poofed up blonde hair, a bedazzled denim jacket, and other stereotypical '80s fashions. What makes this double is that this was the 90s, and she claims the 80s got to Canada a little later than everywhere else.
  • Another episode has Marshall reading a letter he wrote to himself when he was a teenager, and mentions he wore farmer-style suspender overalls because he thought it was cool. Lily states that had he still worn that in college, he would not have gotten laid as fast as he did.
• In Lost, during a round of "I Never", Kate gets Sawyer to admit that he once wore pink. Sawyer just replies with "It was the Eighties!"
• In the Midnight Caller episode "City of Lost Souls", Jack and Laurie look at some pictures of Jack during his high school years in the early 1970s.
  Laurie: You're a lot better looking without the sideburns.
  Jack: Ooh, look at that. That's the last time I'll be a slave to fashion.
  Laurie: I can see why.
• In The Nanny episode "The Kibbutz", the '70s flashback scenes show Fran Fine wearing 10 (1979)-esque cornrows, Maxwell Sheffield wearing a leisure suit and Porn Stache, and C.C. Babcock with long, black Yoko Ono-esque hair.
• Only Fools and Horses: Most people tend to look back on what they wore during the '80s with embarrassment. Mickey Pierce, on the other hand, averts this by never changing his look at all... leaving his wardrobe stuck Two Decades Behind by the end of the series.
• In Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Kira sees a picture of Tommy in his Mighty Morphin days and makes fun of his long hair. Tommy counters that in the '90s everyone thought it was cool.
• Red Dwarf:
  • In "Timeslides", the crew go back in time and meet a young Lister (played by Craig Charles' younger brother Emile) who's trying to become a singer. The Cat finds his outfit hilarious.
    Lister: It's what everyone was wearing. It was called sham-glam.
    Cat: Look at that collar! You could go hang-gliding!
  • In "Pete", the time wand is accidentally used to regress first Cat and Kochanski's hair and then their clothing to an earlier time in their lives. Holly thinks they look like the Turkish entry in the Eurovision Song Contest.
• In 2010, when Sigourney Weaver hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time in nearly 24 years, she showed a still of herself when she hosted in 1986 (on the first episode featuring a new cast after the season 11 fiasco that almost got the show canned for good), wearing this outfit. Things have changed a lot since then, she acknowledged; she "wears a bra now."
• Top Gear's tribute to the now-defunct Saab includes a clip from the old format of the show, featuring a much younger Jeremy Clarkson, complete with atrocious '80s hair and clothing.
  Clarkson: We would like to apologize for the music... and the shirt, and the jacket and the hair...
• In Torchwood: Miracle Day, Jack, when approached about a picture of him with a bushy Porn Stache, simply responds "The Seventies". His clothing, however, averts this trope as he still wears his World War II greatcoat.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Girl I Married", Valerie Richman is embarrassed by the photograph of herself as a hippie chick in The '60s that her husband Ira carries around with him as she thinks that she looked like a bag lady.
• Wishbone: In the last episode, "The Roamin' Nose", Joe Talbot, David Barnes, and Samantha Kepler are about to start high school, so their parents show them their high school pictures from The '70s. David's father gets embarrassed seeing that he had a huge afro back then.

Music

• Guitar World magazine had a monthly feature where guitarists would answer reader-submitted questions. Alex Lifeson of Rush was questioned on the band's stage clothing in their early years, and he responded, "We're hardly the only band to regret what we wore in The '70s."
• Eminem:
  • Played for agonising racial Cringe Comedy in "Yellow Brick Road", in which, at the height of Afrocentrist hip-hop, a young Marshall Mathers and his white rap fanboy friends go to the mall dressed up in Africa medallions and a Flava Flav clock while black kids point and laugh at them.
  • After a photo of him surfaced on the internet of him at his sixteenth birthday party, with a dark brown mullet, wearing a hideous ALF tshirt, Eminem couldn't resist making fun of it in his next single, "We Made You", in which he dresses up in a wig to recreate the picture:
    Lord help us, he's back in his pink ALF shirt
    Lookin' like someone shrinked his outfit
  • In "Berzerk", Slim dresses up in an over-the-top cliche storm of late 80s boom-bap fashion, down to the "Carhartt-less cargos", though he's convinced he's dressed like hot stuff. He gets high on cough syrup and wakes up in the back of a Monte Carlo with "the ugly Kardashian".
  • "So Far..." has Eminem joking that he's over 40 and he still sags his pants.
  • In the behind the scenes video for "The Monster", Eminem (dressed in the fuzzy, baby-blue baggy tracksuit he'd worn to perform "Stan" with Elton John at the Grammys in 2001) says he never wants to wear this again because it's 'too small' and he wants to try 4XL next time.
  • In his verse in 2018's "Homicide", Eminem self-deprecates about the cheesy hip-hop outfits he used to wear in 2003-4:
    I'm bringin' the bandana back, and the fuckin' headband again
    A handkerchief and I'm thinkin' of bringin' the fuckin' fingerless gloves back
    And not giving a singular fuck, like fuck rap
• Mark Wills's "19 Somethin'" is about all the 1970-80 fads the singer remembers, with a certain fond embarrassment at how thoroughly he embraced them
  Farrah Fawcett hairdo days
  Bell bottoms and eight-track tapes
  Lookin' back now I can see me
  And oh man, did I look cheesy
  But I wouldn't trade those days for nothin'

Print Media

• In a Doctor Who Magazine interview about costume design, Tom Baker summarized an imaginary scene of his Doctor shaving, getting dressed, pulling one of the Third Doctor's frilly shirts off the rack, looking at it for a second, and then tossing it to the floor in total disgust. Coincidentally, this is quite similar to a scene in the Target novelization of the Fourth Doctor's regeneration story, "Robot", where the Doctor has just woken up out of a post-regeneration coma to find UNIT has prepared a change of clothes for him ("a velvet jacket, checked trousers, and a frilly shirt") which he refuses to wear, commenting in his internal monologue that they are far too fancy — "What sort of a chap would go around dressed up like that?".

Puppet Shows

• Parodied in The Muppets (2011): While they're tidying up the studio, Fozzie finds an Embarrassing Old Photo of him with '80s Hair ... or so he says. In fact, he looks exactly the same as he does now.

Theatre

• When looking through a photo album during In the Heights.
  "You can tell it was the '80s due to the volume of their hair."

Video Games

• In Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Spidey encounters Luke Cage, who has the temerity to joke about his full-body-spandex costume. Spidey, of course, retorts with a full critique of Cage's original costume... ya know, the one with the tiara. Cage's defense is, of course, "It was the '70s! What's your excuse?" Spidey's excuse, given to Ezekiel in the comics:
  Spider-Man: I was fifteen, gimme a break.
• Invoked in Mortal Kombat 11's story mode, which involved time travel. The older human characters had their younger selves brought into the present day, and present!Johnny Cage is mildly embarrassed by his younger self's 90's day-glo attire. What makes this odd though is that Johnny didn't actually dress that way in the older games—he wore basic kickboxing pants—whereas the other past counterparts had on the outfits they debuted in.
• One Majima Everywhere event in Yakuza Kiwami has Majima in his "24 Hour Cinderella" outfit from Yakuza 0. Even he has no idea what the hell he was thinking with it.
  Kiryu: You look like you got into a fight with a disco ball, and it won.

Web Animation

• The DEATH BATTLE! episode "Cole McGrath vs. Alex Mercer" is presented as a lost script that was originally written in 2013 and recently rediscovered, to reflect how the inFAMOUS and [PROTOTYPE] series that the combatants respectively hail from were at the peak of their popularity in the late '00s and early '10s and how long this episode had been planned given the Dueling Works nature of their games. Throughout the episode, Wiz and Boomstick cringe at the dated internet humor on display throughout the video, including unironic use of the word "awesomesauce", asking Who Writes This Crap?! on more than one occasion.

Webcomics

• There's an ongoing story in Irregular Webcomic!, concerning a time-traveling younger version of the Mythbusters-crew... from the '80s. Complete with ridiculous big hair.
• Flashbacks in the modern arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space occasionally show Merlin in his hippy days.
• A piece of filler art for Commander Kitty has the Velvet Knight crew commenting on how terribly they used to dress after finding an old magazine with them on the cover.
• The Touhou Project fancomic "Maid Alliance's Dark History Presentation" has Kanako dig up some dirt on Sanae's past. Such as this image.◊
  Kanako: This looks like the doing of someone who doesn't understand what Visual Kei is, so worked hard and looked it up on Google.
• A Nothing Nice to Say strip has a group of teenagers looking in an old yearbook belonging to one of their fathers, making fun of his striking a Disco pose, in full Disco Dan regalia, sometime in the '70s. The final panel then shows them being modern-day hipsters, with all the ridiculous haircuts, accessories and clothes that entails.
• Batman: Wayne Family Adventures: In "The Tournament," the Cool and Unusual Punishment for losing the bat family's video game tournament is to wear Dick Grayson's original Nightwing costume (one with a very deep V-Neck) for two weeks, which they treat with great horror. Dick has no idea why his old outfit is treated as a punishment instead of a prize, while Barbara Gordon remarks that he's impossible to embarrass.

Western Animation

• Family Guy:
  • Death dressed horribly in The '70s, as seen in the picture.
  • Another episode has a flashback about the gang (minus Joe who hadn't moved to Quahog yet) hanging out at the Drunken Clam in the '70s, '80s and finally in 1999. They all wear stereotypical clothing in the '70s and '80s, such as Cleveland having a huge afro and bellbottom pants in the '70s, Quagmire wearing a Miami Vice outfit in the '80s, etc. Also, Cleveland's catchphrase changes in each scene.
    Cleveland: Oh that's cool/that's fly/you're living la vida loca!
• Many people in flashbacks in The Simpsons, but particularly Dr. Hibbert (who had an afro when Bart was born, beaded cornrows when Lisa was born, and a Mr. T-style mohawk when Maggie was born).
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Call of the Cutie," Cheerilee shows a class of young ponies a picture of herself when she got her cutie mark, and her '80s clothes and hair gets a laugh.
  Cheerilee: Yes, I know, but honestly, that's how everypony was wearing their mane back then.
  • Doubly hilarious, because some prior My Little Ponies actually looked like that. Bonus points: Cheerilee is one of the few characters directly named after an existing pony. The "Neigh Anything" story in the comic books shows she did indeed wear her mane like that, along with a group of other like-minded ponies.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • The Mayor is blackmailed by Vicky with pictures of him from the '70s. Even though he still succumbs to the blackmail, he makes a strong claim that it was fashionable back then.
  • "The Secret Origin Of Denzel Crocker" has Timmy travel back to the '80s to figure out why Mr. Crocker is so unhappy in the future. He looks for a college-age Crocker in 1984 and remarks that the whole decade is a fashion disaster. He has Cosmo and Wanda poof him up a Miami Vice-outfit with gaudy sunglasses so he'll blend in.
• Done in an episode of Birdz, with Mr. and Mrs. Storkowitz (Mr. Storkowitz is far more embarrassed).
• Code Lyoko:
  • One episode involves Odd publishing in the school newspaper an old picture of Yumi dressed in a ridiculous pink fairy costume for a party (in her defense, she was forced to dress like that by her parents). Yumi is not amused.
  • In another episode, Odd and Yumi switch bodies following a materialization bug. While at Yumi's house, Odd finds colorful provocative clothes and decides to dress in it, much to Yumi's embarrassment.
• In the Disney Hercules: The Animated Series finale, Hercules gets a hold of Meg's yearbook which we don't get to see...
  Hercules: Look at your hair!
  Meg: That was the style of the time!
• Parodied in Clerks: The Animated Series where Dante and Randall get locked in a freezer and remember the first time they met each other at the Quick Stop, with Randall commenting on how he still can't believe how they looked back in the day. The flashback clearly takes place in The '80s so you'd expect them to be wearing some ridiculous 80's clothes, but they're dressed exactly the same as they are in the present day.
• The second "DC Comics Special" of Robot Chicken has The Scarecrow stumble across footage of an old talent show at Smallville High that Lex Luthor participated in as a teenager...as a glam rock act named "Sex Luthor", complete with ridiculous '80s hair.
• Bojack Horseman usually has everyone dressing in over-the-top '90s styles in the scenes set in the '90s, but really took this to extremes with a whole episode set in 2007. From Todd's emo hair, Diane's stacked bob, PB's Ed Hardy tattoo shirts, Princess Carolyn's acid-washed denim skirts, and Emily's Uggs, every detail is painful.
• One episode of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters has Simon the Monster Hunter piloting a giant robot until a policewoman pulls him over and asks for his license. The photo in the license presented to her has him in an afro, a leisure suit and gold-rimmed glasses with jewels encrusted in them. The policewoman then laughs uncontrollably for a bit.
• Hinted at in an episode of King of the Hill when Hank is trying to get Bobby to understand the nature of fads. While we get to see a picture of Hank in an old Members Only Jacket that might not count, apparently Bobby notices Peggy's old class photo which does qualify.
• The Venture Bros.: In one episode, Brock and Rusty reminisce about a past escapade, and we see in the flashback that they've got ridiculous handlebar mustaches. The pair then share a self-deprecating laugh about having grown them.

Real Life

• Dave Barry has noted that he distinctly remembers looking normal in high school, and was horrified to see that his yearbook photo shows a very stereotypical nerd.
• The website Awkward Family Photos gets a lot of mileage from the outfits and hairdos of prior decades, especially The '70s and The '80s. Likewise with the Reddit community Blunder Years.
• The Tampa Bay Buccaneers would prefer everyone to forget their uniforms during their first twenty years. An exceedingly bright orange◊ (Dubbed "Creamsicle" by fans), with Bucco Bruce◊ plastered on their helmets.

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