The enduring legacy of 70s disco designer Halston
There can’t be many fashion designers who have been screenprinted by Andy Warhol, namechecked in a classic disco song, referenced in films ranging from Tootsie to John Waters’ underground classic Polyester, guested on middle American gameshow What’s My Line? and had their clothes worn by the Alist at Studio 54. But, then, there are not many fashion designers like Roy Halston Frowick, otherwise known simply as Halston.
The designer, who hit the peak of his career in the 70s, is the subject of a new documentary by Frédéric Tcheng, the man behind Dior and I and Diana Vreeland: the Eye Has to Travel. Partly narrated by Tavi Gevinson, who plays an imagined archivist, it tells the classic American story of a young man from the Midwest (Iowa in this case) reinventing himself in the Big Apple, first as a milliner at Bergdorf Goodman – designing the much-imitated pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wore at the inauguration of her husband in 1961 – and then by launching his fashion brand in 1969, as the man behind slinky, minimal and glamorous dresses. These designs suited a generation of young women in the 70s who had emancipated their bodies and wanted to celebrate them.
With an arc worthy of a Hollywood movie, Halston’s success was followed by a spectacular fall. He sold his label in 1973 to the industrialist Norton Simon for $16m. By 1983, the brand was bought out again and he signed a licensing deal with high street store JC Penney for $1bn. This devalued his high-class brand, and Bergdorf Goodman stopped ordering. Halston, struggling with addiction issues and a mounting workload, lost control of his brand – and his name – by 1984. John David Ridge, formerly his assistant, was installed as designer. Retreating from the limelight, Halston discovered he had HIV in 1988 and moved to San Francisco. He died from Aids two years later.
Since his death, many have tried to revive the brand – including Sarah Jessica Parker, who was enlisted by Halston Heritage after she wore two of its dresses in Sex and the City in 2009. The label still exists, though it is fair to say it has lost its place on the high fashion radar. Now, it’s Halston’s life story that is in focus: as well as the Halston documentary, a mini-series starring Ewan McGregor and a feature film are in the works. Tcheng says he was drawn to the designer because, “as a filmmaker, his story is bigger than life … I’m looking for stories that allow me to talk about the culture at large, beyond fashion, through a fashion story.” Tcheng believes Halston’s highs and lows show societal changes from one decade to another. “In the 70s he created a more liberated lifestyle for women and gays,”
he says, “and in the 80s the breath of fresh air comes from Wall Street and he gets washed away. It’s a story of cycles.”
Halston’s aesthetic no doubt chimed with the 70s – a decade where the radical women’s liberation of the 60s became more widespread across society. He created clothes that made their impact through sheer simplicity; often cut on the bias and sometimes from just one piece of fabric, they framed the body of the wearer. “I have a theory – less becomes more,” he says in the film. As fitness culture grew, so did the popularity of Halston’s clothes. “Women were really wanting to be liberating their bodies: the body is not something you put in a corset or in a big structure like the Europeans did in couture in the 60s,” says Tcheng. “He touched upon something very simple – people wanted to look comfortable and elegant at the same time.” Although Halston is forever associated with the glamour and nightlife of Studio 54, he also worked with the “day to night” idea that fuels modern dressing, decades ahead of its time. A $200 ultrasuede dress, cut like a man’s shirt, was a bestseller.
Michael Halpern is a London-based, New York-born designer who creates a kind of Halston-like night-time glamour for 2019, worn by women such as Adwoa Aboah and Marion Cotillard. His mother wore Halston in the 70s and he has long been a fan. He particularly admired the way Halston made elegance possible without restriction. “[He realised his customer is] getting in and out of cars, she’s doing meetings, she’s picking people up, she’s up and down from low chairs … It was about a modern woman, at night and during the day.” Karen Bjornson, a Halston model, confirmed his concern with comfort. In a New York Times interview , she said at fittings the designer would ask her: ‘“Could I sit in this dress? Could I walk?”’
If Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent had become personalities before Halston, Tcheng argues that the American designer was the first to “become a household name. He was invited on TV shows all the time, there was a New Yorker cartoon about him and Liza Minnelli. He was really well known and the brand was really tied to his image.” Like F Scott Fitzgerald’s James Gatz transforming himself to Jay Gatsby, Frowick, who was born in the Depression-era Midwest, shed his rural past on the move to New York. With the launch of his label proper in 1969, the designer – who bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Richard E Grant – gave himself a makeover. He adopted the uniform of slicked-back hair, polo neck and cigarette in white cigarette holder, and even tweaked the pronunciation of his own name. In the film, it’s revealed that his mother pronounced his name “Halston”, rather than the grander-sounding Hall-ston that he used. “He was the kid from Iowa and he invented this grand persona, living out his Hollywood dream,” says Tcheng.
Halpern points out that Halston was half a century ahead of today’s brands’ preoccupation with getting their clothes on the great, good and photographed. Halston was famously friends with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger – dressing her in that red dress for her 30th birthday at Studio 54 – as well as Marisa Berenson, Anjelica Huston and other models of the time. He also cultivated a diverse band of models for his show with African-American women such as Pat Cleveland and a young Iman included. All of these women – his inner circle became known as “the Halstonettes” – helped to advertise his brand but in a way that felt like a natural endorsement instead of a billboard. “He became really famous through what we would call now Instagram ambassadors,” says Halpern. For the young designer, his hero’s legacy was never in doubt – thanks in part to the Halstonettes: “That’s why he got so famous – it wasn’t about him at the end of the day: it was those women.”