Bob Colacello: ‘Andy Warhol would have loved AI’ Interview by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

When opportunity knocks, open the door. That’s what Bob Colacello was told by his mother. So he did. And the entire party scene of Manhattan swept in. Colacello was there with his camera to capture it on film.

Forget your faded old photographs: the red eyes and flushed faces of people you are no longer friends with, the dishevelled frocks that are decades out of fashion, the mad antics of which you have long forgotten the point. From the beginning of the Seventies until 1982, Colacello was right at the centre of Andy Warhol’s bright circle. His haphazard snapshots of film stars and socialites, designers and drag queens, Park Avenue hostesses and their mega-rich husbands, bohemian beauties and various handsome hangers-on capture the spirit of a devil-may-care age that has gone.

“It was a very defined era,” says Colacello, 76, when I catch up with him in his New York office over Zoom. “Everything felt new and fresh. Vietnam was over. Aids had not begun. There was no dreary political correctness. Nixon was gone, but the Reagan era, when yuppies replaced hippies, when everyone had an MBA instead of an MFA, had not yet arrived. New York was cheap, it was open. It was in crisis financially, crime was everywhere. But it was very creative. And we, the baby boomer generation, were just coming out of college. We just wanted to have fun. And any kids who had a bohemian slant came to New York.”