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The double-entendre T-shirt genre of the early 90s: a scrawny cartoon nerd named E. Normus Johnson bragging about his Big Johnson, and the Coed Naked line turning every sport into a wink. Sold by the millions on boardwalks and in malls, banned in schools, and litigated all the way to a state supreme court.
Before the mall had logos, it had THE logo: the triangle with the question mark. Guess jeans were the begged-for denim of late-80s and 90s cool, sold by smoldering black-and-white ads that invented the whole idea of the "Guess Girl."
The chunky platforms and stretch boots that owned the late-'90s teen mall — and a founder's story wild enough for a movie. Steve Madden built a shoe empire from the trunk of a car, then went to federal prison for stock fraud tangled up with the Wolf of Wall Street.
The pleated, high-waisted, tapered pants with the white Z. Cavaricci label running down the fly, so nobody could miss what you paid for. They ruled the mall from the late 1980s until the trend collapsed in 1991 and nearly took the company with it.