Over the years, several nightclubs have cast a long shadow over society and pop culture. There’s the Copacabana, Cotton Club, Palladium, Area, CBGB, SOB’s, Scott of St. James in London, and Les Bain Douches in Paris. But none has loomed as large as Studio 54, the disco that became synonymous with Seventies fashion, celebrity and nightlife.

It’s startling to realize that Studio 54 was open for little more than three years.

During that time it had a macro impact on fashion. Stars like Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, Bianca Jagger, and Jerry Hall were photographed and seen coming and going in the latest slithery creations by designers, who themselves were often snapped by paparazzi luminaries like Roxanne Lowit, Bill Cunningham and Ron Galella.

Designers became associated with Studio 54. Among the most prominent were Norma Kamali, Halston, Diane von Furstenberg, Stephen Burrows, Calvin Klein, Giorgio di Sant‘ Angelo, Elsa Peretti, and Stephen Sprouse, who worked, at the time, for Halston.

Studio 54 “elevated designers to that celebrity status,” said Kamali. “It created a platform for them to be celebrities.”

They mixed with their top customers – socialites like Nan Kempner and Lily Auchincloss – artist Andy Warhol, and influential fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez.

Studio, as it was called, claimed its place in fashion alongside Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dress for modern working women, Afros small and large, the guy with the white suit and dimpled chin John Travolta, the first woman with brown skin on the cover of Vogue Beverly Johnson, and the ascendance of disco queen Donna Summer and her wet-lip, curly hair look.

Started by two New York guys who attended Syracuse University together, Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell had experience arranging parties and running clubs like Enchanted Garden, which Burrows would visit, before they opened Studio in 1977.

“They just knew how to throw a party,” Burrows recalled. “And they loved fashion designers and artists, and welcomed everyone so, that made a very interesting mix of people.”

Kamali has a singular history with the famed discotheque.

Her first marriage over, she was living with Schrager when the club, named for the old CBS Studios location on 54th Street, was at its height.

“I knew everything going on at Studio 54 but I never went there,” said Kamali. She neither drank nor did drugs, and wanted no part of hanging out and partying there. And, she added, “I didn’t have the celebrity gene in my body. I was designing my collection. That’s what I loved.”

It was fashion that brought Kamali and Schrager together.

Schrager, Kamali recalled, wanted her to do a fashion show at the club. He sent emissaries to her to plead his case, but she declined. Finally, they met over coffee.

“He said they were having a party and ‘Grace Jones is going to be the surprise guest and we want you to do the costumes.’ I said, yes. But, I didn’t go to the party.

That produced the iconic photos of Jones in the gold lame bodysuit. (Ok, yes, all Grace Jones photographs are iconic).

For Kamali and the favored designers of the moment, Studio 54 was a runway for their creations to reach the public’s eyes. “I was doing Lycra, shine, body suits – clothes that people could dance in,” said Kamali. “A lot of people were wearing my clothes.”

Her sleeping bag coats had their first go-round with fame, when the doormen who had to stand outside by the velvet ropes for hours in the cold, exercising the infamous Studio 54 snobbery policy, started wearing them to keep warm.

About 50 percent of Kamali’s customers at the time were men. “We now call it gender fluid,” said the designer. Jagger and the New York Dolls would come in and buy. “It didn’t look like they were trying to look feminine,” said Kamali. “It was about how they felt. That was the beginning of when people dressed for what they were feeling.”

‘It was sexy clothes,” recalled Burrows. “Sexy, sexy. It was all about sex.”

He too was dressing Mr. Sexy himself, Jagger. “I used to use Jerry Hall,” explained Burrows, “and she suggested to Mick that he come to me. I got to do some tie-dye tops for him.”

Models loved donning Burrows’ clothes in body-revealing jersey, plunging necklines, and bright colors, in the hopes of getting past the dreaded ropes. “Sometimes I didn’t know where they got them from,” said Burrows. He doubted they could afford his dresses which sold at high-end Henri Bendel for $350-450 each (in Seventies dollars). “I was having $10,000 sales days at Bendel. They probably borrowed them from rich women.”

Studio 54 and the fashion era that it represented ended abruptly. The owners were charged with tax evasion. The club closed. The party moved on. And so did fashion.

Kamali was already looking toward collections that were all-matte, all-gray. A 180-degree turn. “When Studio closed, I was doing all these sparkly things,” she said. “Then all the color, all the shine, all the nighttime ended for me. I just went way over on the other side. From dressing for night to dressing for lifestyle.”

And that’s when her sweatshirt collection was born – a seminal moment in 1980s fashion.