Party like it’s 1985: a reveler is fed cotton candy while enjoying a cigarette.

*Top,* partygoers pair off at the Trinity ball in 1981; *above,* dancers swap heels for sneakers at the St. John’s ball last year.

Michael Causton channels flower power on the dance floor, 1987.

Rough and rowdy days at Magdalene College: *top,* dancers get acrobatic; 1987; *above,* partygoers take five on a punt, last year.

A shadowy figure holds court at the Cambridge hunt ball, 1988.

Three sheets to the wind: *top,* students celebrate after a polar plunge, 2023; *above,* a man leaps over a flaming boat sans trousers, 1984.

Party crashers climb into the Trinity May Ball, 1981.

A Magdalene ball gate-crasher is punished with an egging, 1983.

Mayday!

Cambridge’s most infamous party girl tips her hat to Dafydd Jones, the society photographer whose latest book captures more than 40 years of the school’s hedonistic May Balls

By Caroline Calloway

Photographs by Dafydd Jones

If I could tell you one thing: Don’t be jealous. Don’t let this book make you feel like your life is boring. Like all the best parties are happening without you.

First of all, Dafydd and I aren’t always invited to the parties we make art about, but more on that fascinating dynamic later! What I want you to know up front and above all else is that, yes, truly—just like you—I was once sick to my fucking guts with envy when I thumbed through the exquisite Oxford-ball photography of British living legend Dafydd Jones. Are all the better parties always in a different place? A different time? Should I have been born 30 years earlier? Seventy? A century? Two?!