Stefano Tonchi, style editor of The New York Times Magazine, recently co-edited his third book, Excess: Fashion and the Underground in the 80s. Here he chooses books that define that decade.
So80s: A Photographic Diary of a Decade by Patrick McMullan (Powerhouse, $80). Style in the ’80s can be defined as a clash between uptown and downtown. This book is an essential catalogue of the places and people that defined the uptown ’80s, by one of the scene’s real superheroes. Can’t wait for So90s.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (Bantam, $8). Wolfe’s novel is a time capsule of life in the ’80s, an epic overflowing with sex, money, and status symbols. You’d think that nothing had changed in the last 20 years.
I’ll Be Your Mirror by Nan Goldin (Scalo, $55). Now we head downtown, as Nan Goldin gives us an intensely personal record of her life as a junkie artist and, in the process, creates a portrait of her generation. Her journey took her from the East Village all the way to MoMA.
Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz (Washington Square Press, $14). A proto–Sex in the City downtown New York. The characters in this collection of stories—artists, grad students, junkies, and collectors—thought of themselves as the center of the world before globalization and the digital age.
We’re Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy
Brady Bunch