THE 1970s: DECONSTRUCTED GLAMOUR

Studio 54 opened in April 1977 in a former TV studio on West 54th Street. By December it had become the most famous nightclub in the world. The door policy, ruthlessly exclusionary, based entirely on Halston's and Steve Rubell's real-time aesthetic judgements of who deserved to be inside, was itself a kind of editorial, a nightly fashion show in which the ticket was your appearance.

The 1970s are deconstructed glamour because the decade contains two completely irreconcilable aesthetics: the earth tones and natural fibers of the counterculture on one side, and the sequined excess of disco on the other. Platform shoes and platform politics. Halston's clean silk jersey and Vivienne Westwood's deliberate destruction. The decade is not confused. It is having an argument.

These images sit deliberately in the disco half of that argument, in the mirror-ball light, in the sequined wrap dress, in the specific exhausted energy of four in the morning when the glamour and the grit have fused into something honest. New York was bankrupt. The clubs were open. This is what it looked like.