Disco Was Not Dead at The Blonds’s After-Party

Decadence and defiance reigned over New York City last night at The Blonds’s after-party. Unsurprisingly, the brand renowned for its sequins, corsets, and high drama flouted the usual decorums one might expect at a Fashion Week soirée, opting for a rambunctious gathering, where guests interpreted the invitation’s call for “disco best” with avant-garde abandon and slurped down the Absolut Elyx Moscow Mules like water.

From their perch at The Top of The Standard, the glittering crowd gyrated with the Manhattan skyline on jagged display around them. Despite the slush and chill beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, painted faces, towering heels, mesh shirts, and bleached hair prevailed. Courtesy of DJ Olivia Dope, ’90s rap, ’80s pop, and today’s hits pounded with the same voguish intensity as on the runway mere hours before.

Around the gilded bar circled socialites, influencers, glamazons, pretty boys, and pop idols of every shape, gender, color, and age. Still in her makeup from the show, Jillian Hervey of Lion Babe explained, “I first became aware of The Blonds through my mom (actress and singer Vanessa Williams) and they’ve since made several costumes for my music videos. Love them!”

A few feet away, Susanne Bartsch, in a bejeweled bodysuit, leaned against a mirror and exuded her famous energy that cemented her as as nightlife legend 30 years ago.

With sequins and platinum heads glinting, David and Phillipe Blond, the eponymous blondes behind the collection, held court at their table. “Both Phillipe and I are total cinephiles,” David shouted over the throb. “The collection really started with Scarface.”

Flipping back her long hair, Phillipe called this season’s muse “the ultimate bad girl.” In addition to Elvira Hancock and other disco darlings, Phillipe cited party girls of a more recent era, particularly Paris Hilton and Lil’ Kim, who walked in the show, as personifications of this archetype. “Friends,” Phillipe purred. “As well as icons.”

The influence that Hilton, the original “famous for being famous” star, and Kim, Notorious B.I.G.’s protégé who became the most successful female rapper of her age, hold over the designers is hardly a surprise: These women willed the world to accept their unlikely vision of themselves. Their colorful lives, captured in cinematic detail in tabloids and blogs, contain all the excess, arrests, lovers, feuds, and rebellion of an Oliver Stone script—and they lived to see their influence, however mocked by the mainstream media at the time, change the cultural landscape.

Through their resurrection of disco, The Blonds recalled an era of rebellion and celebration in American culture that feels just as timely today as it did 50 years ago.