Collection: Susanne Bartsch

Susanne Bartsch has operated at the intersection of fashion, performance, queer nightlife, and social staging since the 1980s. Beginning with a New York boutique that introduced London designers — Leigh Bowery, Body Map, Stephen Jones, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano — to a downtown audience, she became one of the central organisers of benefit culture and nightlife spectacle in New York. The 1989 Love Ball, now recognised as a landmark AIDS benefit, helped bring ballroom culture into wider fashion and nightlife circulation.

The printed matter collected here — invitations, flyers, announcements — are the surviving paper residue of events designed to be temporary. Each object once moved through the world as a functional support: door price, guest list, image, address. Retained, they become records of a social architecture that no longer exists in any other form.