Jackie Collins (Graphic in 80's Style)

Jackie Collins — Vintage 80s Tee

Nobody wrote rich people behaving badly quite like Jackie Collins.

Beginning with The World Is Full of Married Men in 1968, Collins built a career writing deliciously excessive novels filled with Hollywood stars, ruthless producers, beautiful women, terrible men, money, sex, betrayal, revenge, and extremely questionable decisions.

By the 1980s, she was a phenomenon. Books like Chances, Hollywood Wives, and Lucky became enormous bestsellers, while Lucky Santangelo emerged as her signature character—a glamorous, sexually confident woman determined to control her own life rather than wait around for a man to do it.

Collins knew the world she was writing about. She lived in Hollywood, went to the parties, knew the celebrities, and delighted in the suggestion that her outrageous characters might have been inspired by people everyone already knew. Her famous response was essentially that she wrote about reality—they just called it fiction.

And Jackie herself became nearly as fabulous as her books: big hair, leopard print, shoulder pads, diamonds, fabulous houses, television appearances, and absolutely no embarrassment about giving people exactly what they wanted. She understood excess and never pretended otherwise.

There’s something wonderfully camp about the whole Jackie Collins universe. Her books were glamorous, trashy, addictive, feminist in their own wonderfully complicated way, and designed to be devoured beside a swimming pool while wearing enormous sunglasses.