Translating Halston for a new generation
Netflix show’s designer aims to revive reputation of disco-era legend
“Halston,” Netflix’s five-part, fictionalized limited series documenting the American designer’s spectacular rise and fall from the ’50s through the ’90s, was a dream gig for costume designer Jeriana San Juan. In it, the man who invented American glamour gets the Ryan Murphy treatment: the result is a lush, heady, louche portrait of Halston and his legacy.
“I was intimidated by it,” says San Juan in a phone interview in the days after the highly anticipated series dropped. “But it was the perfect place for creativity to thrive.”
San Juan (known for her costuming work on, most recently, “The Get Down” and “The Plot Against America,” was charged with translating Halston for a new generation, many of whom know his name only through a dusty perfume bottle in their mother’s medicine cabinet.
“Halston’s work was revered by fashion insiders,” says San Juan, who herself graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. “Beyond that, his name and legacy had really faded from the collective zeitgeist.”
She began her research by looking at designers who influenced Halston — he himself looked up to American couturier Charles James and was equally influenced by more contemporary artists such as Warhol. She also looked at designers who were in turn influenced by Halston.
“Tom Ford’s revival of Gucci in the ’90s,” she says, of Ford’s sexy velvet and silk collections that called to mind Halston’s disco heyday. “That was my gateway in.”
There is a tactile connection between these creators of such different eras and it speaks to what gives American sportswear its sense of ease.
San Juan pored through the Condé Nast and Women’s Wear Daily archives, looking for images of both famous and everyday women on the street wearing Halston. The designer made his name by dressing his famous entourage: muses, actresses and socialites in madeto-measure couture — Liza Minnelli and Elsa Peretti, who are featured heavily in the series, wore his clothes exclusively.
He was also one of the first designers to democratize fashion — think of the ubiquitous Ultrasuede shirt-dress of the ’70s. Going mass was a heroic feat of self-branding that saw the man born Roy Halston Frowick from Iowa via Indiana with his name plastered on everything from luggage to sunglasses, socks to an accessibly priced line at JCPenney.
As an early adopter of what is now common empire-building practice, Halston saw his name lose cachet for going broad at the time. As the series explores, he also lost his way in both his personal life and his work (even losing the rights to his name when his backers lost faith), a process expedited by his notorious substance-abuse issues.
San Juan designed about 1,200 costumes for the series, recreating some iconic items (such as the metallic sequin gowns for the famous Battle of Versailles fundraiser in France that pitted American design stars against French legends). Some of the pieces she invented herself in the designer’s style. She also went to town on the vintage market, hauling in many pieces from dealers and private collections.
In my own closet is a vintage Halston gown, one-shoulder goddess-style in canary yellow, complete with red wine stains along the hem. I clearly have had a good time in that dress.
I tell San Juan this and she laughs. “Yes! So many pieces weren’t in great shape. It was the most hilarious thing. Dresses that came from personal friends who were willing to loan me their pieces, they had cigarette holes and wine stains!”
This is a very good thing, concludes San Juan: “It is just so reflective of the way Halston made women feel. What is so incredible about his clothes is that they really celebrate women.
They have this effortlessly Grecian-like ease to them, a ’70s disco energy.” The sensuousness of the fabrics Halston used, she says, made comfort look and feel glamorous.
She also dressed the editors, the money men, the disco throngs, the people on the street in the background of the episodes.
The show depicts so many different fashion periods, but Halston’s clothes have such a timeless element, and a sophistication that means you can’t really pin a date on them, she says.
“The greatest challenge was how do we really get a sense of what year it is on a storytelling level. We created a canvas for those pieces to live on.”
By this she means she worked with the set designer to dress extras — such as the women in the tented showroom when the tie-dye collection went down the runway — in trendy, highly patterned period pieces.
“I found myself in the ’60s and ’70s scenes exploring as much pattern as possible, in colours of those periods, very dated avocado greens and pumpkin oranges, to find a way to contrast” the solid, bold colours that Halston favoured. The people in the backdrop then looked “outdated” beside the Halston clothes.
“It brought an appreciation to modern audiences of how revolutionary Halston’s ideas were.”
To show Halston’s technical wizardry, San Juan first had to teach Ewan McGregor, who portrays Halston, the basics of design and how a designer moves in the studio.
She describes this particularly vivid scene (a fashion nerd, I held my breath watching McGregor as Halston free-cut into fabric onscreen): “That moment in the script just read: Halston creates a dress on Elsa (Peretti, his muse who became a Tiffany jewelry designer and who died this year at age 80). We had to create something and it couldn’t be an original Halston. We took creative licence and I decided on a bias one-seam caftan,” she says.
“We had to illustrate that for the audience,” to show them what a bias cut was. (If you’re wondering, it’s that stretch of drape, between the cross grain and the straight grain.) It took a lot of reverse engineering to work out how to cut the cloth exactly where it would make the neck highlight the model’s bone structure, shoulder to shoulder.
“With very simple cuts, he did something revelatory,” she says. “We wanted to wrap all of these ideas of Halston into one dress so the audience would have the opportunity to see different elements of artistry in one moment. We wanted to gain the respect of the audience — the non-fashion crowd — for Halston’s skill.”
San Juan charted Halston’s own sartorial journey to reflect his rise and fall. Halston had a deceptively simple uniform, relying heavily on a black cashmere turtleneck, which, mark my words, will be influential in men’s and womenswear this year, elevated beyond the Steve Jobs uniform with this revival.
But everything Halston wore was carefully thought out (fun fact: his pants had no side seams).
San Juan brought back Halston’s own in-house tailor to work on outfits for McGregor to inhabit the character. Watch for how Halston’s universe — his clothing, his apartment, his offices — turns red in the series as he slips into despair, adding dramatic urgency as his life falls apart. The costume designer spent time with friends and colleagues of Halston’s to get to know the man behind the fashion as much as possible, “the very sweet, charming person,” as she says.
San Juan also cites the “merry band of muses, his creative family,” that was such an important part of Halston’s atelier and working process: not just Minnelli and Peretti, but Pat Cleveland, Pat Ast, Alva Chinn, Anjelica Huston.
“He was very democratic and very modern in his thinking and the way he looked at inclusivity,” she says. “He had models of all shapes and sizes and colours, something we take for granted now, but he was a pioneer of that.”
This modernity is what makes San Juan think Halston’s image and influence will be making a big comeback.
“He’s very relevant. Women will always want to feel like they do when wearing a Halston.” She says the upcoming Met Ball, celebrating American fashion, “will help extend and perpetuate his true artistic legacy beyond the screen.”
Indeed, watching the thrumming, sweaty, achingly glamorous scenes set at Studio 54 is particularly poignant in this lockdown era.
San Juan says, “We are renewing our own existence right now. Halston’s clothes represent feeling free and celebrating that.”
Red wine stains and all.
“He had models of all shapes and sizes and colours, something we take for granted now, but he was a pioneer of that.”
JERIANA SAN JUAN COSTUME DESIGNER
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