Pose of the Day

Warhol accolyte, Studio 54 stalwart, drag queen Potassa de la Fayette poised at Coyote Hookers Ball, The Copacabana, New York City 1977.

Strike a pose. There's nothing to it.

We like to party, we love that disco sound

Rarely-seen photos by New York photographer Bill Bernstein charting the last days of Disco in New York are on show in London at the Serena Morton gallery, Ladbroke Grove, until 23rd January 2016.

They knew how to throw a party!

The book Bill Bernstein: Disco is available from Reel Art Press

Halston, Gucci...

...Fiorucci!

Farewell to another of the "creators of the 70s", Studio 54 stalwart and friend to the famous and infamous, including Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Madonna, Elio Fiorucci.

From his obituary in The Telegraph:

Fiorucci stores were fun...[the] flagship on Manhattan’s East 59th Street near Bloomingdale’s was known as the “daytime Studio 54" not only because it had its own resident DJ, but because of all the clubbers who met there to drink (free) espresso and trade gossip before the evening got going.

Jackie Onassis, Cher, Lauren Bacall and Elizabeth Taylor shopped there – as did Terence Conran and Marc Jacobs. Andy Warhol was a regular and launched Interview magazine at the store in 1980. The New York drag artiste Joey Arias (who then wore his hair punk-style) was the store manager and occasional star of Fiorucci’s “live” window displays – which also featured such crowd-pleasing attractions as a model reclining in a zebra-striped bathtub, reading smutty paperbacks and blowing bubbles at passers-by.

Divine decadence...

Elio Fiorucci (10th June 1935 – 20th July 2015)

He created the 70s

"Halston. Gucci. Fiorucci." Names indelibly associated with Studio 54 and the last, riotously decadent days of Disco; in particular, the first name - the man who made the scene so much of a magnet for the "beautiful people" - Liza, Liz, The Warhol-ites and the pop divas. Halston. So good they named him once.











"You're only as good as the people you dress."

One of the most successful fashion entrepreneurs in history, without his designs (jumpsuits as evening-wear, maxi and midi skirts, kaftans, flowing blouses, bibbity-bobbity hats - couture and off-the-peg), the 1970s would have looked very different. And without Halston's business (and his influential friends), it would be hard to imagine how certain New York night-spots would have survived.



Facts about Halston:

• He designed Jackie Kennedy's pill-box hat for her husband's presidential inauguration in 1961.
• So associated did his brand become with the fabric called Ultrasuede, that it was also used as the title of the biographical movie about Halston.
• His uniforms for Braniff International Airways staff revolutionised the "look" of the airline industry in the age of the "jet-set".
• In an extraordinary move, in 1984, he was fired from his own company (after his drug use began to affect his work) and lost the right to design and sell clothes under his own name
• Even during his final months travelling to and from hospital (he died with AIDS-related Kaposi's Sarcoma), he retained his flamboyance - he purchased a chauffeured $200,000 Rolls-Royce Corniche to transport him and his family around, and instructed them to auction the car after his death for AIDS research.

RIP

Roy Halston Frowick (23rd April 1932 – 26th March 1990)

Utterly Brill!

In 1992, the consummate guide to feminine charm Boobs, Boys and High Heels: Or How to Get Dressed in Just Under Six Hours was published - and soon became essential reading for club kids, society dames and drag queens everywhere.

It was the product of the fertile imagination of Miss Dianne Brill, legendary hostess, sex-kitten, sometime actress, party-goer and "face" of the 80s New York nightclub scene.















Crowned "Queen of the Night" by Andy Warhol, she emerged from Florida to hit New York with a bang. She become a fashion model and muse for Thierry Mugler, Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood, and launched her own menswear line, worn by such luminaries as Prince, the Rolling Stones and Duran Duran.

Throughout the 1980s, she seemed to be everywhere and seen with everyone who "mattered". As David Hutchings, writing in People magazine in 1985 put it:

The door of the rented limo opens and out comes a vision in outrageousness: a Valkyrie by Fellini. In five-inch stiletto heels and a three-foot blond mane that's been streaked, permed, sprayed, pressed and fried, she stands a formidable 6'2". For this grand soir at the Palladium, New York's club of the moment, she's wearing "something simple - rubber with fringe." The dress is fluorescent white, unthinkably low-cut and as tight as Saran Wrap.

The lady in latex is Dianne Brill, a 26-year-old fashion designer who has become, seemingly overnight, First Citizen of Manhattan nightlife. If there's an opening, a party, a lotto drawing, anything where cameras are clicking from Harlem to Tribeca, she is there. In an era when status is determined by visibility, her bursting hourglass figure is the highest profile in town. When she arrives, the party begins.

Sometime in the 90s she gave it all up, married film producer Peter Völkle, moved to Switzerland and had three children. However, married domesticity did not stop her flair for beauty and fashion, and in 2008 she bounced back into the spotlight with the launch of a range of cosmetics including the fabulously titled "Eye Underwear". Her lipsticks have names such as "Silk Stockings", "Thigh-High Nylons" and "Leopard Brassiere".

Facts about Miss Brill:

• She reinvented the infamous "pencil test", suggesting that women wear a corset or push-up bra and put a pencil in their cleavage - if the pencil doesn't fall, the woman's cleavage is perfect.
• Her rules of survival in the hedonistic 80s club world were: "no drugs, no booze, no weekend gallivanting".
• A mannequin was created in honour of her buxom figure and is still used by Agent Provocateur today.
• Her son Keenan is a male model in his own right.

An interview with Dianne Brill on the Societé Perrier nightlife website.

Dianne Brill official website

Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci...

From the BBC website:

"There was always a ton of people outside waiting to get in - people from all walks of life," says Myra Scheer, an early fan who later became Steve Rubell's assistant.

"Most never got in, but if you caught the eye of Steve or of (doorman) Marc Benecke suddenly a path opened up.

"Beyond the velvet rope was what I used to call the Corridor of Joy. It had ornate chandeliers and everybody there was screaming with joy that they got in. You could hear the pulsating music as you walked through and then you turned left and there was this dance floor. Everybody on that floor had the energy of being a radiant star."

Among them: Margaret Trudeau, Elton John, Marisa Berenson, Diane Von Furstenburg, Debbie Harry, Vladimir Horowitz, Jerry Hall, Margaux Hemingway, Brooke Shields, Ginger Rogers, Cher, Salvador Dali, Richard Gere, Divine, Ivana Trump, Calvin Klein, Amanda Lear, Halston, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Truman Capote, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Grace Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Liza Minnelli, Gloria Swanson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol and of course the ever-present Bianca Jagger...

New York's notorious Studio 54 opened its doors 35 years ago tonight.