Halston was a legendary designer, perfect for his time: the 1970’s was an era of excess, a creative revolution, a creation of mystique, filled with the air-kissing of sexy, famous people.
Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
Roy Halston Frowick didn’t take well to being alone. When he left his childhood home in Indiana, far from the mythical coasts, he dropped two of his names like last season s castoffs, adopted a chic mononym, and headed straight for more densely populated pastures: first Chicago, then New York City. It was in Manhattan that he reinvented himself as a fashion phenom and Studio 54 fixture, surrounded by a rotating Lazy Susan of beautiful people, speaking in a clipped, affected accent that became his signature. He didn t vertically climb the ranks of society so much as he horizontally insulated himself with people, including the model coterie that André Leon Talley christened “the Halstonettes.”
Halston Boss on Iconic Fashion Designer as First Influencer and Creating a Redemption Story
Danielle Turchiano, provided by
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To writer, producer and director Daniel Minahan, fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick, known as Halston, was the “first influencer.”
“He’s somebody who really succeeded on marketing and branding himself,” Minahan says, adding that his mark is still left on “our everyday lives and culture” today.
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The subject of Minahan’s five-episode limited series, aptly titled “Halston” and bowing May 14 on Netflix, first became known as a hat designer, eventually working for Bergdorf Goodman and designing the pillbox hat Jacqueline Kennedy wore when her husband John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president. But later in that decade he expanded into women’s clothing in general, becoming known for luxurious looks before expanding again the following decade into uniforms and fragrances. In the 1980s he created a