New York Rhythm Shaped the History of Dance and Fashion

When Susan Stroman's groundbreaking dance-play "Contact" won a Tony award for best musical, it was just the latest in New York's long love affair with dance and fashion. Throughout four hundred years of its evolution from a bustling colony into a global cultural capital, the city has been at the intersection of those two disciplines. And at that nexus, artists, designers, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community were empowered in countless ways.

As the Europeans arrived here like waves over the Atlantic, centuries of traditions - in the making of garments and what kind of garments, of performance from folk to court dances, of rites and revelry - came along with them. When formerly enslaved blacks traveled from the bowels of the South and made Harlem their home, centuries of belief and oppressed joy came along with them. When skilled laborers were needed to mass manufacture dresses, an entire industry was built on the backs of women of all ages. When conservatives tried to impose Prohibition, New Yorkers decided to hell with it and drank to jazz at illicit speakeasies. When the government decided to wage war in Vietnam and revealed that none of these elected officials could be trusted, New Yorkers took to the streets to fight for civil, women's and gay rights. When the oil embargo crippled the economy, New Yorkers chose to dance the nights away at the disco.

But for a town seemingly defined by its people as a place for the future and unconcerned by their past, these stories continue to affect the present. And those about dance and fashion - detailed in "Mirrorball - Reflections of Dance & Fashion" - are some of the best reasons that inspire people to keep coming here with youth and unspoiled dreams. They fill the seats on Broadway. They come to train at Juilliard, to hone their skills at the ateliers and designer showrooms, to join companies from Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo to the American Ballet Theatre, to summer on Fire Island or all the way up to Cape Cod. They come to make art, to discover themselves through expression, and to carve out a life in this jungle of glass and steel.

Some of the most memorable and impactful works, the most important icons in dance and fashion were born here. Some may have had to travel to be born here. But they were born here. Halston, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Madonna, A Chorus Line, Bob Fosse, Stephen Sondheim, the Loft, Studio 54, Paradise Garage, Roxy, the list goes on and on.

It's been said, more than once, that New York is a state of mind. And for some, this may be true. And yet, even that can only truly be experienced by living here. Only by walking up and down the Avenues across a cacophony of languages, by being immersed in a sea of cultures, beliefs and value systems unlike your own, only then can that state be reached.

And yet, every decade or so, the people who do live in New York, find themselves waking up to a different city. And they lament that the corner bodega has been replaced by an expensive restaurant, the neighborhood dive with a lounge with fancier drinks. What most fail - or refuse - to see is that every generation experiences the same thing. And that's for the simple fact that New York will always be alive with subversions and contradictions, with broken dreams and bright promise. It is what it is because of all those things. And after four hundred years, it's all still true.