‘Of course I call my mum for advice’
Last year, Michael Halpern was still a student. Now, Beyoncé wears his gowns and he shows at The Palladium. Charlie Gowans-eglinton meets London Fashion Week’s most in‑demand name
‘Iam very much a part of that casual clothing thing – that’s what I wear, that’s what I live in. And I would never wear sequins. Well, maybe socks,” concedes Michael Halpern, softly spoken but unmistakably a New Yorker. As we chat in a busy coffee shop near his studio on east London’s Hoxton Street, there is nothing about Halpern that attracts attention – he consciously avoids it, quietly dressed in a black sweatshirt, black jeans, black cap and trainers. But while his own athleisure-wear might suggest a normcore aesthetic, in reality, his is anything but.
Working mostly in sequins, Halpern’s clothes are the tactile embodiment of the phrase “going
out”. There’s no desk-to-dinner wearability here, only full-throttle glitz and glamour. Halpern showed his second collection on Saturday, in London’s Palladium theatre, his signature sequins alongside brocade trouser suits and fringed dresses. His timing is good: after seasons of minimalist catwalk shows, the pendulum has swung back: crystals and pearls, fringing, and ruffles featured at LFW big-guns Simone Rocha, Erdem, and Christopher Kane.
“The other day, for the first time, I saw someone I didn’t know wearing the brand. I was out in Notting Hill, late, and she was getting in a cab. It was a super-short mini dress, and she was wearing these Manolos that were really strappy and these thigh-high wool socks.
“And I just saw her walking across the street, and I was like, holy s---. For someone to buy it, to take their own money and buy it, is amazing. It’s such a crazy feeling that something that we’ve made, that I’ve designed – it’s been in the works for so long, so to have someone just see it in a store and buy it? You don’t really think about that until you see it in person.”
If this sounds like false modesty, it isn’t. In truth, Halpern’s success has come so quickly, he’s still waiting for the other foot to drop. His solo debut at London Fashion Week, in February of this year, was actually a representation of his MA collection from Central Saint Martins (he earned his BA from New York’s Parsons School of Design). Despite being off-schedule, it caught the attention of the press and fashion buyers – who didn’t just admire, but placed orders.
“I went from a student to being in stores in Los Angeles, New York, London, the Middle East. We’re going to be in Hong Kong next season, Milan and Paris. So yeah, it’s been…” he inhales sharply.
“When I see money coming in and out, I just have to think about it as monopoly money, because if I really think about it – I’m being paid this much money to make this clothing, and then I have to pay production that much, and pay salaries…
“It’s just scary and overwhelming and crazy. But thankfully I have people like my mum who was a banker for so long, so she’s very confident in this, and I’ve started to hire people. So of course I call my mum for advice, because I’m not a business person.”
At just 29, it would be easy to lump Halpern into a box with other ‘emerging’ designers – but while his ideas might be new, his techniques are practised. “When I graduated from Parsons, I started working right away. I learned so much technically about how to put clothing together, how to make real luxury fashion. It’s weird for me to think about designing such a luxury garment without having the technique to back it up, because who is going to buy something that’s $3000 if it’s not made well?”
He’s not joking about the prices, either. Some of them are eyewatering: a Halpern sequinned bodice with floor-length train is on sale for £1999 at Matches: a roll neck (also sequinned, naturally) will cost you £855.
“The clothing I make is not cheap, and while there are entry price points, a lot of the stuff is really expensive: there’s a lot of construction, a lot of boning, sort of couture techniques.
“But I would never say it’s couture, because I worked in couture at Versace, so I know the difference very well. But we use a lot of techniques at Halpern that I learned at Versace, and Oscar de la Renta, and J Mendel, applied to something that’s a little bit more accessible.”
As for the aesthetic, that is entirely Halpern’s own – and unapologetically maximalist. The most direct inspiration came from his mother’s wardrobe, and the clothes she’s preserved from nights spent at Studio 54 in the Seventies.
“There absolutely is a tacky sensibility to it, but I think it’s balanced with really meticulous cutting, and I think you have to be really mindful of a woman’s body, whether it be super slender or super curvy. I don’t think fashion is only for slim girls. I mean, who doesn’t like a curvy body under a bustier? It looks so much better than just a little boy’s body.”
His mother has yet to wear one of his designs: “Not yet, but we’ve made something specially for her. But my sister is that girl. She goes out for the night in a bustier with a train with a pair of cropped jeans and a pair of super tall shoes.
“She’s like Mariah Carey: she’s so short she won’t wear flats. She’s very Texan in that way: the higher the hair the closer to God.”
You can see where he gets it from, though he might choose not to wear it himself.
Show-stoppers like this lend themselves to celebrity dressing, and a few early-adopters have already discovered the potential here. Halpern has custom made pieces for Beyoncé and Marion Cotillard, who wore her sequins to the Cannes Film Festival in May.
Elle Fanning wore Halpern on the cover of Schon magazine, while fashion editor and street style star Giovanna Battaglia wore his sequinned bustier and flares to the British Fashion Awards last December.
Not that they are just for special occasions, or at least not in Halpern’s opinion: “How cool would it be to wear a pair of sequinned trousers under a suit jacket to, like, a finance meeting? They’re not overly complicated to put on, you don’t want six straps. It really is a zip or a bustier fastening.
“A modern woman doesn’t have two hours to get dressed, she doesn’t have a ladies’ maid zipping her up in the back. I was talking to Natalie Kingham [buying director at Matches], and she said ‘I’ve been in a hotel so many times with a zip that is so complicated that I have to go out into the hallway and ask another woman to zip me up’; I don’t want the clothes to be like that.”
What he does want them to be is celebratory: this is feelgood, spring in your step fashion.
“It’s a real reaction to what’s going on right now; every day you hear something so awful. I’m from America, so having a president like Trump who is just so hateful, I think it really is a reaction to that, wanting that escapism to feel happy and sparkly and good about something.”