Dianne Brill, the “Queen of the Night”, Looks Back at Her Life in Parties
The New York legend traces her journey from Tampa misfit to downtown royalty, partying alongside everyone from Andy Warhol and Grace Jones to Debbie Harry and RuPaul.
Growing up in Tampa, Florida, with David Bowie posters on her wall, Dianne Brill sensed she didn’t quite fit in. Around 1980, she discovered a store with a basement full of never-worn clothing from the 1940s. She bought it all, then lugged the “body bags’ ” worth of vintage to New York City to sell at Patricia Field’s Lower East Side boutique and at Trash & Vaudeville. “I sat there with empty bags and a handful of cash, and I thought, I guess I’ll move here,” says Brill. “Within six months, I started going to Studio 54, Mudd Club, and then finally Danceteria.” A regular on the 1980s downtown club scene, Brill became a muse to Andy Warhol, who declared her the “Queen of the Night.” Her superpower, as Warhol once noted, was that she “makes nobodies feel like somebodies with the big hellos she gives to everybody.” Brill “wasn’t into drugs, and I didn’t get into a downtrodden thing. I got into people who were nice,” she explains. Her brains helped turn her It girl persona into businesses—a menswear label, a cosmetics line, and TV gigs. After decamping to Europe, where she raised her three children, Brill returned to New York City permanently in 2022. While she isn’t keen on the version of New York “where people stand in line forever just to get something they saw on Instagram that day,” she still finds the city full of possibilities. “You can always reinvent yourself.”
Brill attending a soirée at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, in 1987.
Omnipresent on New York’s downtown scene throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Brill is often credited for establishing the “famous for being famous” playbook long before Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian. Her nightlife adventures were chronicled in gossip columns and magazines. She once had a New York Times reporter follow her around to five parties in the span of a few hours—a normal weeknight for her. Promoters would fly her all over the world, from London to Vienna to Milan, to host events. “It sounds like jet-setting, but it’s not like when your dad owns the jet. It was accessible and cool,” says Brill. “Also, rents were $300, so we could all create, travel, make, do, and take risks every day.”
Brill at her first modeling job, in Tampa, at age 17.
“It’s wonderful to be raised in a place that’s beautiful,” says Brill of Tampa, where she and her three brothers grew up. “Even being in a Publix parking lot, it would be sunny and then the sky would be purple, orange, and red.” Her mother, who was born in Britain and raised in Havana, was a journalist who kept a collection of newspapers and Interview magazines. Her father, a snazzy dresser, informed Brill’s love of fashion. Her Florida upbringing prepared her for New York nightlife in unexpected ways. “There’s a little Florida scam in you. You can handle the shit that comes your way. You don’t freeze like a deer in the headlights. You get going.”
By her teenage years, she was ready to leave the Sunshine State. “I could see that I didn’t fit in,” she says. “If you get laughed at for wearing a black turtleneck, a knee-length fitted skirt, and cha-cha heels, and you know you look cool, you realize you’re the right girl in the wrong place.”
Brill attends an “outlaw party” with Andy Warhol (left) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (right) in 1986.
Outlaw parties were held in illegal locations, like abandoned subway stations; invitations spread through answering machine messages and word of mouth. These events “could last for five minutes and the police would shut them down, or it could be hours.” Brill often went out with Warhol. “Andy was a matchmaker. He was always trying to get me to date Jean-Michel,” says Brill. “Andy was a very loyal friend, and, contrary to popular belief, he wasn’t this terror. He was very kind to me.”
Brill with (from left) designer Betsey Johnson and writer Fran Lebowitz at Brill’s 1986 birthday dinner, at the Japanese-French fusion restaurant Café Seiyoken.
Fran Lebowitz “is a New York Yoda. Everything that comes out of her mouth, even when she’s speaking casually, is just noteworthy and brilliant,” says Brill. “She’s not really in nightlife anymore. I usually run into her at some random place during the day, like a grocery store.”
Brill with the artist Keith Haring at her menswear showroom in 1984.
“Keith [Haring] and I were in the same building—611 Broadway. I had my atelier there, on the sixth floor; Details magazine was below me, and Keith was above me. It was like Andy Warhol’s Factory, except we all had businesses,” says Brill. “I loved Keith not the way adults love each other—I loved him as if we were both kids.”
Steve Rubell, the co-owner of Studio 54, “first introduced me to Dolly Parton at the Palladium,” explains Brill. “In the ’80s, to be larger than life, you literally had to be larger than life, and we both were. Here, we had both slimmed down, but it was still body-ody-ody. She is not fake. With all that stuff on the outside, she is the most authentic, present person you’ll ever meet.”
Brill with Grace Jones, whom she met through the club scene, in 1989.
“She’s authentic,” says Brill of Grace Jones. “The way she looks and the way she presents herself is very similar to Andy [Warhol]. Grace is still around and touring, and she’s not five hours late like she was before. She’s an hour late.” Last summer, Page Six reported that the two had partied together at the Roof at Public Hotel, on the Lower East Side, well into the night.
In 1989, “I was called ‘the Shape of the Decade,’ ” says Brill. “I was basically the same size as all the other girls, but I had boobs and a butt and a very small waist.” Adel Rootstein, who was considered the world’s premiere mannequin maker, made models in Brill’s likeness. “It was a big deal. The last time they had done that was with Twiggy in the ’60s. I toured with these mannequins around the world. I did every television show you can imagine.”
Brill with Campbell at Nell’s in 1987.
To a certain set, Nell Campbell may be best known as the top-hatted Columbia in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but to New York’s cultural elite, she was the co-proprietor of Nell’s, the 14th Street nightclub that regularly mixed club kids, celebrities, and intellectuals. “I sat down at a table one night with Norman Mailer, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Cher, Liberace, and Nell. These kinds of things would happen all the time,” says Brill. “You would never go out casually. You would be dressed thinking tonight’s going to be the best night of your life.”
In the early ’80s, Brill married Danceteria co-owner Rudolf Piper, and together they hatched a plan to get Thierry Mugler’s attention at a dinner in New York. “We did a slow dance, and I made sure to be in front of him so he would see me. I knew that Mugler [above left] was a dancer—I’m not, but I’m sexy when I’m dancing,” says Brill. “That night, his right hand, Alix Malka, came to me and said, ‘We would love to talk to you about being in the next show.’ I thought I would just lose my mind. All those nights you’re sitting in your room in Tampa feeling like no one gets you, then you come to your place, and not only do you belong, but you’re so welcomed—all your little-kid dreams can come true.” Brill once walked a Mugler show just months after giving birth to her first child, Keenan (above right). “Naomi, Linda, and Cindy were kissing Keenan backstage. He’s a hunky six-foot-two charming man now.”
Brill with the fashion editor Hamish Bowles at a party in Paris, circa 1993.
“Hamish [Bowles] has grown up to be such a legend, but honestly, he was a legend from the moment he arrived in New York,” says Brill. “I ran into him a couple years ago, and it was like running into the same guy.” For this party, Brill chose a custom Mugler bustier and trenchcoat she had originally worn on the runway in Tokyo. “I felt like the Queen of Everything.”
Brill’s first Mugler show was his spring 1988 “African Summer” collection, for which she walked the runway as the bride. “He loved my look—he loved my body very much. He celebrated it like a dream. But he said, ‘There’s something I would love to improve…you need an inch in your leg,’ ” says Brill. “He had custom stilettos made for me that discreetly added to my height. It was just an inch more that made me, in his perception, the perfect woman.”
