In the early 1970s, Ken Sprague purchased Gold’s Gym, a struggling fitness club just blocks from the Pen. Sprague believed it needed to be more than a training space—it had to be a theater. He organized competitions, invited photographers and let director George Butler use Gold’s as the set for his 1977 documentary, Pumping Iron. The film, which followed rising stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, became a surprise hit and helped legitimize a culture often written off as self-obsessed spectacle. Its success lured magazines and TV shows to latch on to the commercial fitness boom. By decade’s end, Gold’s Gym T-shirts—printed with a cartoon strongman inspired by Mr. Clean—were stretched across hulking torsos nationwide.
In the years that followed, Hollywood turned bodybuilders into icons. Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone dominated the box office with action hits such as Conan the Barbarian and the Rocky and Rambo series. They were cast as warriors and street fighters, and their physiques stood for grit, dominance and—at times—moral clarity. Their silhouettes became templates, reproduced in pop culture ephemera.
Even their attire began to echo their form. The 1980s power suit was a sharp departure from the soft-shouldered Brooks Brothers tailoring of old-money WASPs and the disheveled denim of countercultural hippies. What had once been flaunted in cotton tank tops now took shape in dark worsted wool: extended shoulder pads, inflated chests and waists tightened like lifting belts. Paired with a bright tie and contrast banker collar, the power suit embodied the “greed is good” ethos of a new tycoon class.
As the decade wore on, the line between discipline and vanity began to blur. No cultural figure captured that slippage more than Patrick Bateman, the status-obsessed antihero of American Psycho. Although the novel was published in 1991 and the film adaptation released in 2000, Bateman was unmistakably a creature of the ’80s. By day, he moved through Manhattan in Valentino Couture suits and Oliver Peoples glasses. By night, he peeled off his uniform to reveal a body maintained with crunches and skin-care routines.
In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Bateman quietly unravels when a colleague slides over a newly printed business card—subtle off-white coloring, tastefully thick, watermarked. For Bateman the card is a stand-in for status, a way to measure self-worth in a room full of successful men. Style isn’t about his personal expression; it’s how he proves he’s the alpha.