Saturday Night Fever is the 1977 film in which John Travolta plays Tony Manero, a young paint-shop worker from Brooklyn who lives for the weekend dancefloor.
Its origin story is a twist worthy of a gossip column. The film was based on Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, a 1976 New York magazine article by Nik Cohn, presented as reportage; two decades later Cohn admitted that the characters were largely invented, modelled on British mods he had known in the 1960s. The Bee Gees’ soundtrack was reported to have sold around twenty-five million copies by 1980, and in 2010 the Library of Congress added the film to its National Film Registry. The white three-piece suit from the climactic dance contest, one of only two known to exist, sold at Julien’s Auctions in 2023 for 260,000 dollars, proof that polyester can age very well indeed.