1970s Music-Fashion Face-Off: Disco vs. Punk

Though just 50 blocks apart, New York’s Studio 54 and CBGB were epicenters of utterly distinct movements in fashion, music, and art. Studio 54, a spacious, mirrored monument to the excess of the late 1970s, was a glamorous playground for the rich and conspicuously energized. Down on the Bowery, CBGB, a graffitied hovel of grunge, was the mecca of the American punk-rock scene. The clothes, hairstyles, and affectations of these clubs’ respective patrons were as distinctive as they are enduring and enviable. Vanity Fair is but 100—there’s no reason to suspect that both disco and punk styles won’t feature prominently in the magazine’s 200th-anniversary celebration. Below, a side-by-side comparison of the iconic trends that have come to represent each subculture.