Roy Halston Frowick didn’t like being alone. When he left his childhood home in Indiana, far from mythical shores, he dropped two of his names like last season’s planes, adopted a chic mononym, and headed straight for more crowded pastures: first Chicago, then New York. It was in Manhattan that he reinvented himself as a fashion phenomenon and Studio 54 luminaire, surrounded by a rotating Lazy Susan of beautiful people, speaking with a cut and affected accent that has become his signature. He didn’t move up the corporate ladder so much vertically, but he isolated himself horizontally with people, including the model coterie that Andre Leon Talley called “the Halstonettes”.
Halston’s story spawned biographies (Simply Halston: The Untold Story by Steven Gaines), an eponymous documentary, and numerous museum retrospectives. Director and executive producer Daniel Minahan says, “It feels like, in this world of influencers, these are the people who really were the first to do it.” The designer made what Minahan calls a “chosen family” that bounded everyone from high society lady Babe Paley to downtown Warhol superstar Pat Ast, all united in his designs affection. It would have been quite embarrassing. He created this idea of a status dress.
Ewan McGregor enters the role of Halston, but the show also gives screen time to his collaborators and muses, from Elsa Peretti to Liza Minnelli. “They’re kind of cross-pollinated.” Anticipating the dawn of fashion designers as full-fledged celebrities, Halston has appeared in his own ad campaigns and bolded in company columns. While he became legendary for his nightlife exploits, they were also a corollary of his daytime job, an early form of networking assisted by nose candy. Jeriana San Juan, costume designer said, “This whole idea of surrounding yourself with a company of gorgeous women who all wore Halston really shows his understanding of how photography and the press influenced [fashion], how he could use this to his advantage.
But, she quickly adds, it’s not just status that has propelled the Halston name to the top. It was the way he designed. “He understood women and listened to them; he was not trying to force his voice entirely on someone. He was trying to find what worked for the client and find a way to bring his own art into line with what he was feeling. “She spoke so affectionately and so highly of him because she felt truly heard and was a part of this process. And I think that’s something that really translates into the end product,” says model Chris Royer, one of the Halstonettes.
Minahan points out that they had no zippers or buttons. Everything was easy to put on (and, perhaps more relevant to the Studio 54 crowd, easy to take off.) He didn’t draft his designs using muslin, but often applied fabric directly to the body almost as if he was sculpting, as shown in a scene where he takes Minnelli from mod moppet to disco queen with only a few yards of silk and decisive gestures. There is a brief, but enlightening, moment in the series where Halston walks down the streets of New York City and sees women still dressed in the bohemian styles of the era, which helps highlight just how much the change has happened. tectonic plate would be his alternative. His designs may seem simple, but, says San Juan, “that’s the beauty of minimalism: doing something that’s noticeably very easy and simple, and then when you really show off what it is, that’s actually enough. complicated. It takes real architecture to create this level of ease effortlessly.”
She said, During the beginning of research process, she “touched and selected Halston dresses as much as I could, as I wanted to understand not only the artistic pleasure of her clothes, but the construction behind them and the tremendous effort to create very easy lines.” “They allowed the women who wore them to shine and appear elegant and glamorous. And that’s what is so powerful about these clothes. They don’t wear women; women wear them.
She decided to “work with Halston’s voice more than recreate things exactly,” but took a Halston-style approach to fittings. For example, when she dressed Krysta Rodriguez, who plays Minnelli, she wanted Rodriguez to be able to move and dance in her costumes, so she would film her and send the videos to Minahan. For Elsa Peretti, played by Rebecca Dayan, she incorporated many of Peretti’s archival creations into the costumes so that her iconoclasm shone through. a chainmail bra is shown in a scene where Dayan boldly wears it under a suit jacket at a business meeting.
A persistent word Ewan McGregor kept noticing in past Halston interviews was “comfortable,” San Juan told me, to the point that he was practicing saying it with Halston’s accent. It’s a priority that still seems appropriate today, she says, because her clothes “are body conscious, but not confined to the body.” No wonder the fall 2021 collections were influenced by the designer. “That idea of, ‘I want to go out and observe. I want to look alluring, I don’t want to look like I’m trying too hard and want to be comfortable?” she said. “I want to say, that’s it Halston.”
