The story behind Halston’s '70s-glam costumes, from reviving Studio 54 to teaching Ewan McGregor how to sew
There’s a scene early in the first episode of Halston, the new Netflix miniseries, when fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick is creating a dress for Liza Minnelli – while she’s in it. Halston, played by Ewan McGregor as a man on the brink of becoming a defining cultural force, unfurls a bolt of crimson silk satin and drapes a length around a nude Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez). A twist here, a pin there, and he considers his invention in the full-length mirror.
“There, now,” he says, satisfied. “That’s a Halston.”
“That scene was really about creating a clean line of red,” says Jeriana San Juan, the series’s costume designer. “In the galaxy of his designs, it’s such an iconic colour and silhouette. But in the script, it just says, ‘Halston creates a dress on Liza.’ It was my job to figure out what that meant. There were a lot of moments of invention like that.”
The show, which is available to stream now, tells the story of the fashion star who gave Seventies style its slink. Halston travelled in glamorous circles. He rarely ventured out without a phalanx of Halstonettes on his arm and sparkled in starry company (as well as Minnelli, he dressed Bianca Jagger, Cher, Anjelica Huston, and most of the Studio 54 crew). He was also a tyrant with extreme appetites. And in the end he lost control of his name, making him a cautionary tale about brand dilution.
Which makes it easy to underestimate how revolutionary his designs must have seemed when they first appeared in the late Sixties. “The iconic part of Halston wasn’t just the glitz and the glamour,” San Juan says. “It really was his incredible artistry. I wanted to highlight that and make it a character in the show.”
She sought to “celebrate the essence of Halston”. That meant re-imagining and re-creating early batik- and tie-dye-based collections, slithery bias-cut halter dresses, shirtwaists in his signature Ultrasuede fabric (a synthetic with a suede-like finish) and sequin kaftans.
Her research included seeking out friends and former associates of Halston, who died of AIDS in 1990. She visited Chris Royer, one of his house models, at home (“I looked through her archive, turning the clothes inside-out so I could really study them”); spoke with designer Naeem Khan, now a noted designer who got his start at Halston; and quizzed Sassy Johnson, who began as Halston’s secretary and rose to run his made-to-order womenswear division. In the show, her character informs Halston that he’s run through two weeks’ worth of coke in a day. He screams at her, apoplectic over the empty Elsa Peretti box, “Get it, Sassy!”
“As many stories as all these people had about his flamboyant personality or how he was so demanding,” San Juan says, “they had an equal number of stories about how charming and funny he was, how wonderful it was to be in his presence, how he really understood women and made them feel at ease.”
You can see this quality best in scenes when McGregor is sweet-talking his socialite clients, or refining the fit of a dress on Elsa Peretti (Rebecca Dayan), an assistant who would go on to become one of Tiffany’s most valuable jewellery designers.
Of course San Juan didn’t only outfit the cast; she also gave McGregor a crash course in fashion design. “It was a lot of the technical aspects, and then conveying on some level how a designer’s eye moves through a design process.” She tutored him in everything from how to hold a pair of fabric scissors and pin fabric onto a model, to how a designer assesses his work. He would observe her looking at a dress in the mirror instead of viewing it close-up, then incorporate that into his performance. “All those little details are things I never thought about, but that he picked up on by watching me work. He was very eager to learn as much as he could.”
He ended up with ample time to refine his technique. Almost as soon as filming started last February, it was halted by Covid-19. San Juan sent a sewing machine home with McGregor so he wouldn’t get rusty over the seven-month hiatus. He set himself the challenge of making a pair of trousers. “I was so proud of him. He did sew one pocket on the outside of the trousers. But honestly, they were really fierce.”
They returned to the set and resumed filming in September with pandemic safety protocols in place: masks, visors, surgical gowns, limited contact times and so on. “I was very fearful that it was going to inhibit the creativity and cloud the process, but once I got the hang of it, it was absolutely normal. We just had to re-choreograph our brains.”
Any series about Halston was always going to be glamorous. And ambitious. There are scenes on a scale that Halston – who once had seafood flown by private jet from his favourite Manhattan restaurant to his beachfront house in Montauk – would have appreciated. Executive producer and director Daniel Minahan and his set designers summoned up the legendary New York celebrity hangout Studio 54 for scenes including Bianca Jagger’s 30th birthday party (the one she rode into on a white horse – wearing Halston). And he depicted the Battle of Versailles, the legendary benefit show that pitted four French designers against four Americans.
When Halston and his entourage arrive in Paris Orly for the Versailles show, they greet the press as a unit. “I really wanted to make them this dark hive of New Yorkers dressed for glamour and fashion, which means black. And for it to feel like, ‘Halston and his Halstonettes have arrived.’”
San Juan used some genuine vintage Halston in the show – she found a batik piece on 1stdibs, the auction site; a sequin kaftan ended up being the centrepiece of the Versailles collection. “It was disintegrating. I was honestly worried that it wouldn’t make it through the production.”
Everything else, San Juan and her team made. The responsibility of interpreting and presenting her own version of Halston’s work weighed heavily. Over the year-plus of production and hiatus, she dreamt of the designer “all the time”: “I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I felt like I should get a tattoo, ‘What would Halston do?’” For a start, he’d have to applaud.
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