In the final minutes of Whit Stillman’s 1998 cult classic The Last Days of Disco, a group of twentysomethings are standing at the entrance to the Chambers Street subway station when they learn that their favorite Studio 54-esque haunt has closed, and that the disco era may in fact be dying around them. Then Josh—the handsome, manic-depressive D.A. played by Matt Keeslar—delivers a rousing defense of disco.

“Disco will never be over,” he says. “Something like this—that was this big, and this important, and this great—will never die . . . Those who didn’t understand will never understand . . . Disco was too great, and too much fun to be gone forever. It has got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.”

“It’s the old story of nostalgia for the present,” Stillman said on a recent phone interview from Paris, where he now lives, to revisit The Last Days of Disco and its cultural significance 20 years after the film’s release.

The last in his “doomed-bourgeois-in-love” series, which also includes Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona (1994), Disco follows the vagaries of a group of college friends as they navigate the path from preppy to yuppie—juggling publishing jobs, love lives, and a punishing club-going schedule. When The Last Days of Disco was released 20 years ago, in 1998, the dust had settled on polyester jumpsuits and platform heels. Even if you have never shivered while waiting for a bouncer to recognize you as the real deal outside of Danceteria, you at least understood the experience thanks to films like Disco, Boogie Nights, and antecedents like Saturday Night Fever.

From Everett Collection.

Looking around today, it appears Stillman was prophetic in his conviction that disco could never die. On runways from New York to Milan, shoulder pads and leopard print are back; Tom Ford’s most recent New York show featured models in sequins and power suits walking down the runway to music by Chic and the Pointer Sisters. A recent issue of T Magazine was entirely devoted to early-80s New York, while millennials, born well after the disco era, post instagram photos with teased hair and leg-warmers for disco-themed parties singing along to Earth, Wind & Fire’s biggest hits.