Purple Magazine
— The 30YRS Issue #38 F/W 2022

purple night (part 13)

purple night

Nightlife was first an artistic idea. Beginning in the Belle Époque, artists reinvented nightlife, from Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s Cabaret Voltaire to Francis Picabia’s dinners on the French Riviera. Nightlife became erotic and eccentric, modernity’s clandestine theater and inventive factory, from Berlin to New York and Paris. For the avant-garde, dinners and parties were more than a playful time to socialize: they were a place for experimentation, for ideas and dreams.

2006 wow! a nightlife magazine issue one

During the ’70s and ’80s, nightlife became more democratic, wilder, and more glamorous. It was all about style, sexual liberation, and drugs. Then in the ’90s, electronic music and rave parties created a new scene far from city centers. More music, more drugs, more sex — until it became an industry and a marketing tool.

Let’s be honest: smartphones have killed nightlife. No one can be anonymous anymore, and everyone is watching, to the point that the best clubs now make you hand over your phone.

Purple started doing parties with André Saraiva and Lionel Bensemoun, 1 first at Le Baron in Paris, then with Paul Sevigny at the Beatrice in New York and with André Balazs at the Standard Hotel. Soon enough, the Purple parties and dinners spread all over the world, reconnecting with the tradition of artistic nights. A place where people enjoy the freedom of the moment, but also 2 dream of something else, share ideas, thoughts, frustrations, and hopes. The night, to us, is still the matrix for the future.

For these reasons, the party pages have always been an important part of the magazine. We also published WOW, an extra publication, from 2006 to 2009, mixing photos of nightlife from different eras.

Here is a small sample from the thousands of snapshots we have published in Purple over the years.

 

[Table of contents]

The 30YRS Issue #38 F/W 2022

Table of contents

© Purple Institute

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