The Eighties They Never Made
Every decade eventually becomes a costume. The eighties have been wearing theirs for a while now—the synth patches stitched into chart pop, the block typography on streetwear, the occasional perm spotted like a rare bird in the wild. What the internet adds to this is the specificity of the counterfactual: not just nostalgia for what existed, but desire for what couldn’t have.
Melbourne illustrator Fulaleo ran with that desire and made something genuinely compelling out of it. He took a full roster of contemporary pop and hip-hop—Drake, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Selena Gomez, Dua Lipa, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Cardi B, Childish Gambino, and a dozen others—and reimagined their album covers as if they’d been released in 1983. Muted palettes, serif type that looks like it was set in hot metal, faces framed the way they used to be before every image became overlit and centred.
What gets me about these is how naturally it works. Drake in a setup that could’ve been a mid-period Hall & Oates sleeve. Rihanna looking like she’d just finished a stadium run opening for someone far less interesting than her. The images feel less like parody and more like a genuine alternate timeline—one where the music business evolved differently, but these particular people still somehow ended up at the centre of it.
There’s a version of this exercise that’s just pastiche—swap the fonts, add some grain, call it done. Fulaleo isn’t doing that. The compositions hold up as design objects, not just as jokes about the decade. He understands that the eighties had a visual grammar worth taking seriously, however garish it gets in the wrong hands.
I keep coming back to the Dua Lipa one in particular. Something about the colour choices and the slightly overexposed quality of the lighting makes it look like a record that would’ve been played to death on late-night radio, a record you’d find in a charity shop thirty years later and not quite be able to place. Treasures from a past that never existed, which is the best kind.