“Ten minutes after I walked into Future, I knew the year [1988] was going to be dramatically different,” says Swindells, who was Time Out magazine’s nightlife editor and photographer at the time. “I left early to go to Shoom on the following Saturday, which was off the scale, and I realized that this is big. I wanted to make the book because the explosion of Acid House culture in 1988 was life-changing, the biggest youth cultural movement since the 1960s.”

At the launch event at Dover Street Market last month, among the old friends and faces from Swindells’ clubbing heyday, there were lots of people queuing up to get their copy signed who looked like they weren’t even born in 1988. “It’s always lovely to reach out to a new audience who weren’t there and who respond to it just like we responded to Woodstock and Glastonbury, and what happened in the 1960s,” says Swindells. “I think it’s always inspiring to see how other people had their own youth quake.”

Swindells says the liberated atmosphere and diverse crowd at these seminal events in the late 1980s helped to break down barriers in a country that was at the time very repressed sexually and riven with division. “The other really big, important part of it is how diverse it was,” he says. “It was for a while, beyond diverse in every respect: class, sexuality, race. Homophobia was much more prevalent in the late 1980s than it is now, and I think that’s partly because of rave culture and ecstasy. It meant that you interacted with people differently.”

This open-minded acceptance of difference and respect for one another feels particularly relevant today. “I’ve spoken to so many women and they didn’t feel any sort of fear when they went to those clubs and raves,” says Swindells. “They didn’t get any threat, which in itself was pretty amazing, because certainly that’s not how a lot people feel now when they go out.”

The era also helped to usher in a looser, freer, less status driven style of fashion during a time when men still wore suits to nightclubs. Today, the loved-up mood of 1988 is embodied by brands such as Story Mfg., the new rave inspired direction that CELINE HOMME is now taking, and LOEWE’s sun-drenched Ibiza collections. The men and women in Acid House As It Happened can all be seen wearing what might now be considered “gender neutral” fashions of loose T-shirts with graphic prints, baggy jeans, dungarees and floppy hats, their skin glowing with heat and sweat from MDMA and house music.

In the introduction to the book, Ms Sheryl Garratt, editor of The Face between 1989 and 1996, concludes: “Once more, we’re facing hard times. The barriers are being rebuilt, the old strategies of divide and rule returning. But all of that disappears on a dance floor, which is why clubbing, to me, has always been a radical act, as well as a joyful one.”

Love, it seems, will always be in fashion. Can you feel it? Of course you can.