Dianne Brill, Icon of Manhattan Nightlife in the 1980s, Celebrates 66th Birthday in Spectacular Fashion
When Dianne Brill arrived at the Soho Grand Hotel for her 66th birthday party on Saturday night, she did so with the same sense of spectacle that made her an icon of Manhattan nightlife in the 1980s.
People stopped and stared as she stepped out of a black S.U.V. Standing 6-foot-3 in white platform boots, Ms. Brill was wearing a silver satin wraparound dress and holding a glittering wand in one hand. Her hair was big and blonde, and she wore a big necklace that read “B-R-I-L-L.”
“I’m back,” she said. “Maybe not everyone knows it yet, but I am, and that’s why I’m having this birthday party. To show everyone I’m back.”
The party was billed as “One in a Brillion.” The dress code on the invitation was “Strictly Brill,” meaning the kind of thing Ms. Brill might have worn at nightclubs like Area and Danceteria four decades ago.
She came to New York at age 22 from the suburbs of Tampa, Fla. Soon she seized the mantle once occupied by Edie Sedgwick and Bianca Jagger as downtown’s reigning “It” Girl. She also became a muse to Andy Warhol, who once stated, “If you were at a party and Dianne Brill was there, you knew you were at the right party.”
Her answering machine overflowed with messages from Mick Jagger, Sting, Keith Haring, Grace Jones and Jerry Hall. She worked as a runway model for Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, and she designed men’s wear for Prince and Duran Duran.
The tabloids called her the Queen of the Night, and she was the rare creature of downtown to cross over into the mainstream. In 1985, People ran a feature on her, and she was a guest on “Late Night with David Letterman.”
But beneath the party-girl exterior was a budding entrepreneur. Even when she was out till 4:30 a.m. at the Palladium and the Pyramid Club, she stuck to three rules: “no drugs, no booze, no weekend gallivanting.” And toward the end of her time on the scene, she published a book, “Boobs, Boys and High Heels: Or How to Get Dressed in Just Under Six Hours.”
In the mid-1990s she married Peter Voelkle, a German children’s television producer, and moved with him to Europe to start a family. She kept an apartment in the East Village, though she has lived primarily in Zurich for the last three decades, raising three children, as she ran a cosmetics line that sold products like Dianne Brill Eau de Parfum.
Now that the kids are grown, Ms. Brill is back. Her old haunts like Mudd Club are long gone, but she has taken a liking to the Polo Bar and the Nines.
“I know New York has changed,” she said. “But ever since I came back, I’m meeting people who have that same scent I smelled when I first got here, back when I was just a girl from Tampa, who was tired of sitting around in the mall waiting for something to happen to her.”
“I had a nine-year reign as Queen of the Night, and that’s a long time,” she added. “There are It Girls who don’t adapt. They get bitter they can’t maintain the attention. But I did adapt. For me, being Queen of the Night is a state of mind.”
Early Saturday night, Ms. Brill’s friends gathered at a long table in a private room at the SoHo Grand for an intimate dinner. They reminisced about how they used to read about her downtown exploits in Page Six and Interview Magazine and how encountering her at clubs was akin to sighting a Hollywood celebrity.
“Thank you, all, for making me feel like the girl of the hour,” she said, after she blew out the candles on her birthday cakes. “Because I have been missing that feeling.”
Ms. Brill’s friends reflected on the distinct breed of celebrity she once embodied, with people calling out to her from taxi cabs, though she was little known outside the city.
“I don’t think that kind of downtown celebrity exists today,” Jean-Marc Houmard, a co-owner of Indochine, said. “I still remember meeting her as a young man. She complimented my jacket, and I was like, Oh my god, Dianne Brill just complimented my jacket!”
“When she comes into Indochine now, young people might not know who she is, but they’re intrigued,” he continued. “They all ask me, ‘Who is that?’ People still want to know who she is. And that’s what being an It Girl is really about.”
The designer Jill Stuart also weighed in on Ms. Brill’s legacy.
“She was the Queen of the Night, and everyone knew her,” Ms. Stuart said. “But she is still the Queen of the Night, because that personality is inside Dianne wherever she goes.”
Kyle Stuart, a 27-year-old music manager who befriended Ms. Brill at Boom Boom Room during a Pride Month party, evaluated her from a more historical perspective.
“There’s an ephemeral quality to being an It Girl,” he said. “From Chloë Sevigny to Amanda Lepore, there will always be another one, and there is something bittersweet about that. But to me, Dianne is everlasting. She’s the original queen.”
It was nearly midnight when the rowdy party started in the hotel’s nightlife venue, Club Room. A D.J. duo blasted George Michael and Duran Duran, as friends old and new danced on couches. One man wore a giant Brill Box costume, and a woman wore a ponytail-like adornment that evoked a vinyl outfit Ms. Brill wore in the 1980s.
The dance floor was crowded with people she knew from decades ago, along with a crop of younger fans who have become smitten with Ms. Brill more recently.
“I met her one night, and all of a sudden I’m talking to her about my breakup,” Olivia LaRossa, 27, said. “She gave me motherly advice. We talked for 45 minutes. Only after did I learn she partied with Warhol. She’s become a nightlife godmother to me and my friends.”
At 2 a.m., Ms. Brill was still posing for selfies with her fans.
“One of my rules is to always leave at the peak of the party,” she said. “But not tonight. Tonight I might be the last one out of here. Because I haven’t felt this way in a long time.”
Ms. Brill was then distracted by someone — a young woman with platinum blonde hair swaying alone on the dance floor.
“Her,” Ms. Brill said. “She has it.”
