Halston | American Dandy

In New York of the 1970s, the must-have of the season was called “a Ford.” Translated into the present, the Acne drainpipe jeans or  Manolo Blahnik‘s high heels recently would have been called “a Ford,” or this summer‘s Roman sandals by Balenciaga.
Not many articles of clothing from the 1970s could maintain their “Ford” status into the next decade and take on historical dimensions. That includes Diane von Fürstenberg’s wrap dresses or Claude Montana’s leather jackets. And most definitely the shirt blouses from Halston, the “premier fashion designer of all America,” as “Newsweek” confidently proclaimed in 1972.

Actually, Roy Halston Frowick had no choice but to become famous and, like a character in a novel, simply call himself Halston. He had just as much talent and business sense as his later friend Andy Warhol, who also started as a window display decorator, but on top of it he looked at least as good as Udo Kier and Helmut Berger and had the magnetic character of a well-educated man of the world. For red bedsheets, he wore red knee-highs – the Yves Saint Laurent of the USA. In the early 1970s, his long hair was the only thing that always looked like some foreign object on him.

From hat maker in Chicago, supported in a fatherly way by star hair dresser André Basil, he switched to hat maker in New York at Bergdorf Goodman: young, alert and smooth, polite and sexy, the dream of all middle-aged society ladies with a black American Express card. This is where he met Jacqueline Kennedy whose head was too large for conventional hats. In the early 1960s, before he declared the hat fashion dead, she still wore his pillbox hat when her husband was sworn in. A woman from Texas slipped Halston a check, which in 1968 enabled him to start his own company, Halston Limited. In his first shop on 86th street whose playful, exotic interior contrasted in an appealing way with the refined unpretentiousness of his clothing, the glitzy “Cat Pack” quickly established itself, a mix of jet set and bohème, the typical wild heterogeneous melange, that also characterized Warhols entourage. The success of fashion designer Halston effortlessly came about through creatively juggling fabrics and people.

In addition to his collections, during the day he took care of lucrative licenses, at night in a cashmere pullover immersing himself in the champagne and drug clouds of the parallel disco world, where everyone took poppers and exchanged underwear. With his entourage, the Halstonettes, which included Liza Minelli, Martha Graham, Elizabeth Taylor and Anjelica Huston, he was a regular at Studio 54, where the Halstonettes sang for him: “Forget Donald Brooks / Halston has all the looks.” At a dinner if not all the women fluttered in wearing Halston, it was strange enough for Andy Warhol to comment on it, as he did upon occasion of Diana Vreeland’s “Russia Show” at the Metropolitan Museum in 1976: “Barbara Allen was there, the only one of the ladies not wearing a Halston.” Halston characterized the 1970s as a designer and party celebrity. In addition to his jet-set cliental, he clothed the employees of airline companies and auto rental agencies, the police and American athletes for the 1976 Olympic Games. And in the 1970s, he already designed collections for the store brand of mainstream department store J.C. Penney, like Lagerfeld and Cavalli did for H&M recently. The luxury designer didn’t fear the mass market and had more than thirty licensed products marketed, including tennis towels, gloves, sunglasses, wigs and especially his perfume in Elsa Peretti’s drop-shaped bottle, which cross-financed his couture collections. At the time, that was already a common practice, but Halston not only licensed more than any other designer, he also designed each product himself.

With his shirt blouses, caftans, pantsuits and pyjamas from cuddly materials like jersey, chiffon, cashmere, but also polyester and particularly synthetic Ultrasuede, Halston filled a gap in design after the youth-oriented, eccentric 1960s, defining the look of the 1970s, the debauched party decade before AIDS hit. “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci — he looks like a still, this man is dressed to kill,” as Sister Sledge sang in 1979’s “He’s the Greatest Dancer”. Halston didn’t want to lose unconventionality of the 1960s – the new freedom – but combined it with the elegance of classic couture. While in Paris, designers like Yves Saint Laurent or Kenzo took up the ethno-look and art nouveau styles and, in London, Vivienne Westwood whipped out punk, in Halston’s American minimalism, casual functionality and glamour refreshed one another in a spectacular manner. He created clothing from an uncomplicated understatement where women looked ladylike, but nonetheless relaxed. Everything was soft and flowing and flattering, as if from a seamless mold, and no strict demands were placed on the wearers, but in a mature way the look was very sexy. The sensitive delicacy of orchids, Halston’s favorite flower, reconstructed with fabrics that have more of a friendly look.

Outfits > Halston, Fall / Winter 2008 Ready- to-Wear

It is precisely Halston’s cashmere 1970s, which the current revival is so intoxicated by. Nothing at the moment is as exciting as exploring the border between conservative and glamorous – and that’s exactly Halston’s domain. If the recent fashion epoch that went from Hedi Slimane to Scandinavian post-streetwear took place under the sign of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on razor-sharp, square cuts and stormy youthfulness – let’s say: beer drunk from the bottle – then one is now happy about a mature, less-agitated style, about a curbed bubbling with nonchalance – champagne from glass flutes to put it exactly or more current: Aperol. The newly awakened interest in Jil Sanders’ ultra-clear cuts under the aegis of Raf Simons or the changing of the guard with Lucas Ossendrijver, Nicolas Ghesquière and Lars Nilsson, at the established fashion houses Lanvin, Balenciaga and Gianfranco Ferré, are the strongest indicators for this change of course. In particular, Lanvin’s pyjama-like suits for summer 2008 take the step, which Halston’s throw-on clothing had taken in the early 1970s: casual is the new elegant, moderate the new hysteria, pyjama the new evening gown.

That is why the revival of the Halston brand couldn’t have been scheduled more appropriately. Actually, one just would have to reissue old collections, just like Adidas had the greatest success at the turn of the century with models from the archive’s shelves. But those in charge at Halston don’t want to make things that easy. The legendary film producer Harvey Weinstein (“Sex, Lies & Videotapes,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Lord of the Rings”) holds the rights to the brand Halston. Together with tan, blond star stylist Rachel Zoe and Tamara Mellon (UK “Vogue,” Jimmy Choo shoe company) hired Marco Zanini on behalf of Weinstein to carefully continue the legacy. And Zanini, formerly head designer for Donatella Versace, recognized the signs of the time. He knows how perfectly the old line fits into current times, and carries on the Halston trademark: soft fabrics like jersey, cashmere and silk, rusty pastel tones next to lots of creamy gray, seamless flowing. Pure and simple. Liza Minnelli paid a visit to the show in New York’s very important Gagosian Gallery (after all, the gallery is so notorious that at the last Berlin Biennale it was worth a parody/hommage). Is the circle closing here to Halston’s former heyday?

In the early 1980s, Halston the perfectionist and control freak lost it. His brand had already been owned by a conglomerate for some time. And although his collection had lost none of its appeal, he was fired for unreliability and was prohibited from using his own name. In 1990 Halston died of AIDS. But his myth is present in a way it hasn’t been for a long time – thanks to the renewed interest in the 1970s. If Zanini now admirably carries on this myth with his collection, then 2008 can be the year of the resurrection of the H with the entire power of remembrance of the only postwar decade where one looked elegant while behaving very freely too.

Those who still need some imaginative food and don’t want to wait for Harvey Weinstein’s Halston documentary to open in cinemas can pick up “Halston,” a book of photos from Phaidon Verlag (2001, out of print), and the “Andy Warhol Diaries” from Warner Books (1989). Also check out the “Love Boat” episode from May 2, 1980, where fashion czar Halston strolls across the deck in a cashmere pullover.

Text > Jan Joswig

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