‘The dancers said: we never get to wear stuff like this’
Designer Michael Halpern decided to use ballerinas from the Royal Ballet instead of models this season – with captivating results, finds Tamara Abraham
If you’ve even a passing interest in the arts and a presence on social media, you may have already seen the new Halpern collection. Not because you were sitting on the front row at London Fashion Week (alas, it remains an industry insider privilege), but because, in lieu of a traditional show, the label released a short film via Youtube on Friday featuring dancers from the Royal Ballet performing in eveningwear.
It’s captivating stuff, seeing Leticia Dias take to the Royal Opera House stage swathed in pink and orange silk, Sumina Sasaki held aloft by her partner in sequin-covered stovepipe trousers, or principal Fumi Kaneko leap and spin in a rainbow fringe dress. Halpern’s high-end party frocks may be beyond most of our means, but seeing them come to life on screen is something we can all take pleasure in.
“I grew up looking at runway, but being able to story tell through film feels more lasting. It doesn’t feel momentary like a runway show,” designer Michael Halpern explains, when we meet ahead of Fashion Week at his south London studio. “It feels very different from working with models.”
For a man who creates such dazzling partywear, he is an unassuming figure. He’s in head-to-toe black – we both are, to each other’s amusement – a stark contrast with the vibrant garments on the rails around us. Even though he moved to London for the Central Saint Martins MA course almost a decade ago, he is still very much a New Yorker. “I am an East Coast person,” he says. “Which puts me out of my comfort zone all the time. And I like that discomfort, I like having to figure out things.”
That the past 18 months have required him to figure out things is an understatement. They will probably have been the most challenging of his career. Halpern is Mr Occasionwear – his early collections spearheaded a disco revival and won him a highprofile fan base that includes Beyoncé, Katy Perry and Amal Clooney – but the pandemic robbed us of occasions to attend.
Instead of hand-wringing though, as many might have done in his place when the first lockdown came into effect, Halpern joined a group of volunteers in making surgical gowns for the NHS, later going on to cast frontline workers to model his last collection by way of tribute.
This time around, he chose to amplify another group of people for whom the pandemic was catastrophic. “The performing arts have been really affected because you can’t do this stuff on Zoom,” he says. There was a shared empathy between his team and the dancers too, in that neither party has desk-based roles that could easily transition to remote working. “We do very different things, but there are so many similar challenges that we had to deal with. They had to be performance ready whenever the stages lit back up. Same with us, we had to be ready for when [lockdown restrictions lifted].”
It was while designing this spring/ summer 2022 collection that the lightbulb moment happened. “We had been working on this fringe technique [when] we decided that working with the Royal Ballet was what we were going to do … So then we were thinking about how something would move and working it into the collection.’
Halpern worked closely with choreographer and dancer Kristen Mcnally, who tried on samples to see how they felt to dance and move in. “It was incredible to see her interpret something that we would usually just send down a runway,” he says. “I was so nervous that the dancers’ movements would be too restricted, but they were like, “We never get to wear stuff like this’.”
Even his signature orbs, which contain the wearer’s arms and are more works of art than clothing, benefited from being on a dancer’s body. A feathered dress inside a Swarovski crystal-covered version became a shimmering disco ball when worn by a ballerina en pointe.
Of course, you don’t need to be a professional dancer to take a Halpern look for a spin. These are clothes that make anyone want to shimmy and twirl, and the women he designs for span a broad range. “I have such inspiring people around me, like my mom, my sister, like so many of my friends, whether they’re a doctor, or
‘Story telling through film feels more lasting – very different from working with models’
they work in a gallery,” he explains.
His mother, in particular, is an important muse. She was a regular at Studio 54 and Halpern grew up hearing her and her friends talking about that time. “She was very fabulous, still is very fabulous. She’s the reason I’m a designer,” he says, adding that his parents are visiting at the moment, reuniting the family after two years apart. “Listening to her talk about how that type of dressing made her feel really informs my work.”
It’s that feel-good moment that he strives towards more than anything else, and witnessing that moment never gets old. “We have this bespoke client who ordered this incredible jumpsuit,” Halpern recalls. “It was complicated, but seeing the way she looked at herself in the mirror at the final fitting was the whole reason we do what we do.
“Of course, some people do it to peacock, but we do this so you feel good,” he adds. “That’s the whole reason we make clothes. Fashion is so insane and impractical in many ways, but I think that’s what people enjoy about it.”