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