It was an early morning in 1987 and New York City was waking up to the most horrifying news. Legendary artist Andy Warhol, widely known for his pop art paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and several famous babes like Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson, was found dead in his bed due to a sudden post-operative cardiac arrhythmia. Or simply said: an irregular heartbeat.

 

NYC was dying for a new groundbreaking era. The Velvet Underground had been long time inactive from the music scene and the nightclub Studio 54 had kept their doors shut for several years now. Warhol’s sudden death could probably be seen as the last and final boom before the current era went dark and a new decade – and with that, a new era -- was about to begin. So it could not have been any timelier for Michael Alig and James St. James to turn NYC into the world of their own – the world of the Club Kids.

 

"They were the new faces of the NYC nightclubs, dressing up in the most extravagant outfits that had ever been seen anywhere, not even on the couture runways"

 

 

Beginning in the late 1980s, Alig and St. James became the leaders of the new era that NYC was in the desperate need of. They were (together with a bunch of other outstanding personalities) the new faces of the NYC nightclubs, dressing up in the most extravagant outfits that had ever been seen anywhere, not even on the couture runways. It was a time of ”more is more”, a time of acclaimed appearances in talk shows and a time of romanticizing drugs in conjunction with the club scene. And their appearances at clubs owned by Peter Gatien such as The Limelight and Palladium.