Lightning in a Bottle

I took Thom to see Studio 54: Night Magic at the Brooklyn Museum for his birthday.  Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager caught "lightning in a bottle" when the doors opened in 1977.

 All the galleries featured disco fashion.

How's this Stephen Burrows motif for iconic 70s design?

This Zandra Rhodes outfit reminds me of a great Tove Lo song:  "Disco Tits."

Liz Taylor danced in these shoes.

YSL held the launch party for "Opium," a fragrance, at Studio.  Cocaine would have been more apt.

Regular Richard Gallo turned fashion into performance art by remaining motionless on the dance floor, an object to be seen and desired.

Trust me, despite what's been said ("If you can remember it, you weren't there."), standing still wasn't an option for most clubbers.

Who can forget the photo of Bianca Jagger astride a white horse on the dance floor?  But Grace Jones is actually a much better avatar of the era's anything goes zeitgeist.  Her tank top nods to "Le Jardin," a mostly gay club where I danced to "Rock the Boat" by the Hughes Corporation with friends while still in college (and the closet). 

Jones gave some "really big shews" at the former site of the Ed Sullivan Theater. 

That's a gun she's holding!

VIPs were an integral part of Studio's mystique, an aspect commemorated by Andy Warhol in a silkscreen and one of the many invitations he received.

The club even attracted politicos like Bella Abzug who celebrated her 57th birthday at the club.  Gal pals included Shirley MacLaine

. . . and Gloria Steinem.  Watch "The Glorias" on Amazon and you'll see why I think she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

But models like Jerry Hall got the most ink.  Hard to believe she's now married to Rupert Murdoch.

I got the biggest kick out of the celebrity ephemera, like the opening night guest list.  

Where have you ever seen a celebrity juxtaposition quite like this?

The bare-chested bartenders and busboys were BEYOND.  More than four decades later I still recall the busboys' silk gym shorts.

An odd section of the exhibit memorializes AIDS casualties who were affiliated with the club, including Steve Rubell.  He once complimented a jacket I was wearing.

Here are Steve & Andy in the Pines, in front of Calvin Klein's beachfront home.

Some Roy Cohn ephemera in the same section made me wonder if his buddy Donald ever patronized the club.  If so, he wasn't cool enough to get his picture taken or maybe the exhibit's curators decided to treat him like a Confederate statue.

Nostalgia Trip

Grace Jones greets visitors to "When Fashion Danced," the Stephen Burrows retrospective at the Museum of the City of New York.

Although I was only dimly aware of him, the exhibit caught my eye because his heyday coincided with the Studio 54 era.  While I was figuring out who I was at Columbia, Burrows was sketching this.

He was one of five American designers who fought in the Battle of Versailles, and the only black one.  Walter Cronkite included a segment about it on the CBS Evening News.

Color certainly didn't scare Burrows.

I especially like this birthday candle print.  It's definitely something my mother might have worn, even in El Paso.

All the mannequins in the show are black.  Pretty fierce, huh?

Apparently his dresses were quite comfortable, cut on the bias and unstructured.  He expected the women who wore them to go commando.  Easy to imagine Cher or Liza (who actually performed at the Battle of Versailles) doing that, but Barbra not so much.

The chick in the background of this photo is his muse Pat Cleveland.  I once rode a boat with her to a beach called Super Paradise in Mykonos.  Trust me, it wasn't anything like it is today.

Burrows' designs definitely reflected the hypersexuality of the times.  He called this his "cock and balls" dress

. . . and used the pattern more than once on clothing that could be worn by women or men who were brave enough.

I bought the catalog when I learned that we had something more than Studio 54 in common:  he and his models were often photographed in the Pines, where he had a house.  It's a wonder we're both still alive.