The Club Kids That Made Fashion History

Before TikTok and Instagram, if you wanted to be seen, you had to go out. Nightlife was the stage, and the clubs of the 1980s and ’90s became incubators for music, style, and scenes that reshaped culture itself.

“It was the golden age of nightlife, created by visionary entrepreneurs—and, of course, the people who showed up” says Olle Thorvik, once one of Oslo’s club kings and author of “Nattverden”. He is hardly surprised that exhibitions and documentaries keep circling back to those years.

Club looks were self-styled, original, and far more avant-garde than the glossy version of the 1980s that resurfaces whenever the decade is recycled. This was long before so-called street fashion was considered a legitimate part of the industry—back then it was a parallel universe of style. As designer Stephen Jones says in the documentary “Club to Catwalk“: “It was not about being “fashionable, that would have been the kiss of death. One looked for the approval of one’s friends.”

London’s Design Museum is currently showcasing “Blitz: The Club That Shaped the 80s”, a tribute to the Covent Garden haunt where Steve Strange ruled the door and fashion-forward misfits found their tribe. Every major city had its own equivalents.

“You went to clubs to hear new music, see what people were wearing, ask where they got it. You had to be there,” Thorvik says. “That’s how trends happened.”

Thorvik’s own initiation came in Paris in the early ’80s, when he was working as a model. Nights at Bains Douches meant brushing shoulders with Karl Lagerfeld, Natassja Kinski, and legendary host Hubert Boukobza. He quickly realized that the success of a club hinged on its guest list: the right crowd made the room. By the time he returned to Oslo, he had traded in modeling for a head full of continental ambitions.

Back home, the city felt drab. “In the seventies, Oslo was gray. Coffee shops with bad coffee, no bars had street-facing windows, nothing like what we’d seen abroad,” Thorvik recalls. But change was coming. Café Sjakk Matt opened, with the works of artist Pushwagner on the walls, and chessboards and backgammon on every table. Still, Thorvik points to another venue as more decisive for style: Radio Nova, launched by Kari Jaquesson above her father’s restaurant located right by the gateway to Oslo’s westside.

While Sjakk Matt’s look was West End chic, Radio Nova’s was wild, queer, and eclectic. Designers, stylists, hairdressers, models, preppy westsiders, and a contingent of fashionable African expats all mingled. “It might have been Oslo’s first truly mixed club, where gay and straight partied together,” Thorvik says. “They played early hip-hop, Grandmaster Flash, and guests treated the dance floor like a stage”.

From there, Oslo’s nightlife exploded. Studio 26, Fun Pub, Noble Dancer, Stravinsky all became crucibles of style. At Fun Pub, located in the city center, the look was pure 1980s cliché: sweaters tucked into high-waisted jeans, patent leather belts, pixie boots, big hair. “Everyone looked like Joey Tempest, vocalist in the ’80s-band Europe,” Thorvik laughs. By contrast, Stravinsky and Noble Dancer drew the posh crowd sporting Jean Paul and Ralph Lauren polo shirts.

Fashion was the drug of choice in the ’80s. The hard drugs came later, along with AIDS. By the 1990s, the scene had darkened: crime crept in, and cocaine was everywhere. Thorvik shifted gears, running Kristiania Club, a sprawling house venue, and co-founding Friday Society with stylist Jojo Champfleur.

“We were the first people of our generation to actually not wish we were straight” says Boy George in the documentary “Blitzed”.

If the 1980s belonged to a handful of tribes, the 1990s were a riot of subcultures. And at the center of it all was a more visible gay scene.

“It probably influenced fashion more than anything else,” Thorvik says.

“I never buy expensive clothes he said…They just don’t look good on me… I hate people who can afford to shop in expensive stores.”

The quote was printed on a jacket designed by swedish born designer Kjell Nordstroem. He brought club style to the Oslo scene under the artistic name Baron von Bulldog. Born in Sweden, Nordstroem had lived in Paris, where he spent time at Les Bains Douches and worked as a stylist for Jean Paul Gaultier, among others. Back in Oslo, he and his friends and models – mostly from the queer community – shaped the nightlife with fashion shows and the club concepts Doris Love Club and Strictly Kinky.

Thorvik traveled constantly, pulling inspiration from Barcelona, Ibiza, Paris, and New York. In his book, he describes Paris’ nightlife as a “fluffy pink poodle” and New York as a “black beastly Rottweiler”.  The contrast was stark. Paris felt safe, all gays, models and champagne. New York shocked him: the infamous Limelight, housed in a church, was raw and dangerous, with cocaine everywhere.

Walt Cassidy, in his book New York: Club Kids, called that era “the last analog subculture” a self-styled movement of androgyny, deconstruction, and deliberate shock. “It was about tearing things apart and putting them back together, scars showing. A metaphor for the ’90s,” Cassidy said.

Looking back, Thorvik believes the youth of the ’90s were the last analog generation who truly lived out their lives offline. “If you wanted to find new music or fashion, you had to go out and meet and talk to people, see what was happening for yourself,” he says.

Today, TikTok and Instagram have replaced the club as the arena for discovery. And while that has made style more global and accessible, something has been lost.

“I don’t think we’ll ever experience the kind of nightlife and social scene we had in the ’80s and ’90s again,” Thorvik says with a shrug. “That era is over.”

All photos from Olle Thorviks book “Nattverden” are used with the author’s permission.