Throughout the 1970s, Halston was often flanked by a squad of models and celebrities, including Anjelica Huston, Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnelli. In the documentary, women who wore Halston’s creations recall his ability to use a single piece of fabric and transform it into a beguiling shape that shifted on the wearer’s body.
“His clothes danced with you!” says Minelli who spent decades as Halston’s close friend and confidant.
By the end of his 20s, Halston had already designed the pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy wore to her husband’s presidential inauguration. By his early 40s, he had helped break France’s global dominance of fashion with 1973’s landmark Battle of Versailles Fashion Show, which pitted top American designers like Halston and Oscar de la Renta against famous French peers including Saint Laurent and Christian Dior.
Through headline-grabbing stunts — he was responsible for Jagger riding a white horse around Studio 54 at the height of the nightclub’s notoriety — he cemented his position as America’s best-known designer. Yet Halston continued to micro-manage his empire, hand-designing clothes worn by everyone from American Girl Scouts, whose official uniforms he redesigned,to Avis car rental workers and US athletes at the 1976 Olympics.
“Halston” is the brainchild of Frédéric Tcheng, the French-born documentarian behind 2014’s “Dior and I.” The new documentary, which he wrote and directed, exposes two sides to the American designer.
The film depicts Halston as an aspirant, Tom Ripley-esque figure, whose rise from obscurity was made possible by a succession of masks he hid behind, shielding his true identity with eccentricity and a flair for showmanship. At the same time, Tcheng’s film argues that he was a democratizer of fashion who dreamed of breaking the great class chasm to bring elegance to the American everywoman (whose dignity and power he had seen in his own midwestern mother).
Despite his once-huge public profile, Halston mostly kept his own story hidden. In interviews, he repeatedly rebuffed questions about his past: “The past just doesn’t interest me so much,” he squirms in one scene.
In reality, he was from a working-class home in Des Moines, Iowa, and spent his youth in provincial midwestern cities before landing a job as a custom milliner at New York’s Bergdorf Goodman department store. His work there culminated in Jackie Kennedy’s aforementioned pillbox hat, a radically clean shape that inspired copies across the US.
But it was upon leaving Bergdorf that Halston — following in the footsteps of milliners-turned-fashion designers like Coco Chanel and Jeanne Lanvin — took what Mears calls his “quantum leap” into designing clothes.
He scored early hits by masterminding the hot pants craze and designing “Ultrasuede” suits, which became best-sellers for an emerging generation of young professional women. He then began developing his own signature style.
“The 1970s was all about youth, dancing, being sexy (and) being carefree,” says Mears. “And his lifestyle, as well as his clothing, embodied that. But he also maintained a really strong element of elegance. His clothes were never disheveled.
“Always clean, always very modern-looking. At the same time, the clothes were meant to be worn often without bras — they were often halter necks or cutaways, so you saw skin and you also saw a lot of the female body very clearly underneath the clothing.”
Halston’s impact is clearly visible in the work of designers like Tom Ford, whose glamorous late-1990s womenswear bears his influence, according to the Washington Post’s fashion critic Robin Givhan. By making everyday outfits luxurious, he was also an early pioneer of “athleisure,” adds Mears.
What’s more, his business empire set a template for today’s ambitious designers.
In 1973, he signed a deal with food conglomerate Norton Simon, which also owned Max Factor cosmetics, giving him huge financial backing (though the deal meant he no longer owned his own name). Then in 1982, he made a $1 billion deal with JCPenney, the affordable department store where he had shopped as a child. Today, collaborations between major designers and high street brands like H&M are common, but at the time it was major news. The decision resulted in his label being booted out of high fashion stores including Bergdorf Goodman, which had given him his start.
Model Alva Chinn, one of his group of so-called “Halstonettes,” tells Tcheng that the JCPenney deal transgressed the boundaries of exclusivity that fashion fiercely protected: “He stepped out of the norm, and people like their boundaries that are set between them and those.”
“It was pure hell after that,” says Don Friese, Halston’s vice president of sales, who recalls high-fashion brands cutting orders to distance themselves from the increasingly accessible label. “He realized he’d done the wrong thing.”
Haltson was subsequently removed from the helm of the business that bore his name. This, and his premature death from AIDS-related complications at the age of 57, make up the film’s tragic second act, which tells of how he disappeared from American fashion. In losing his name, he lost control of his legacy. The brand, now known as Halston Heritage, has been sold on repeatedly in the 21st century, with former president Sarah Jessica Parker and previous co-owner Harvey Weinstein among those who failed to recapture the magic.
“In some ways, we see this as a tragic tale,” says Mears. “But it’s also a good tale, I think, to tell.
“I hope in the midst of this we don’t forget he was also a great pioneering designer. He didn’t become famous just because he was good at self-promotion — he became a great designer, and remains a great designer in the minds of many, because he was so revolutionary.”