If you managed to survive the 1960s, you realized one day you were just a drug addict and not a peace-loving soul anymore.” Schumacher’s first film credit as costume designer was, by the way, the 1972 adaptation of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, for which Halston generously provided exquisite clothing samples. This is how costume designer-turned-director Joel Schumacher ( St Elmo’s Fire, The Lost Boys), played in the show by Rory Culkin, remembered it. Halston and models attend Diana Vreeland’s Costume Institute gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on December 8, 1981. “Everybody who copied it put a dent in it,” Halston shrugged. Viewers honed in on the hat’s seemingly intentional dent, an imprint the first lady had made by accident while securing the headpiece during the blustery inauguration ceremony. But, there’s also something serendipitously Halston about why the designer became a worldwide viral sensation in a pre-internet age.
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The strikingly clean look was the tipping point that ushered modernity into the mainstream. Kennedy take his 1961 presidential oath, his wife Jackie would likewise be anointed global cultural icon status-Halston’s pillbox design syncing with the duck-egg blue coat (by courtier Oleg Cassini). Halston’s talents-originally as a milliner-and his impeccable taste made him a lightning rod for Bergdorf Goodman’s high-society clientele, one of whom would prove particularly influential. The midwestern designer was already a household name by that point. It was Halston who hosted the infamously decadent white-themed Studio 54 party in honor of Jagger, the one where Minnelli and Jagger were snapped releasing white doves. Among them, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Anjelica Huston, Cher and model Pat Cleveland. Soon enough, she was joining him at “101”-his 101 East 63rd Street home, which played clubhouse to the city’s creative elite-and Studio 54. “We got along instantly, and he became my fashion mate,” Minnelli recalls of that magnetic first encounter. In real life, Minnelli’s godmother, original multi-hyphenate Kay Thompson, introduced the star to the designer, setting up an appointment at his studio. “Ewan went through intense training to figure out how the draping process works, and it resulted in the best dress that I’ve ever seen on my body-and it just came out of a single bolt of fabric and a couple pins.”
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“Halston and Liza meet each other, and he just starts draping fabric on her body,” Rodriguez told Vogue, as she toasted the show’s virtual premiere from her New York home this week. If you haven’t already watched the throbbing trailer, here it is in all of its bedazzling, F-bomb-dropping glory. Ewan McGregor plays the title role, flanked by “Halstonettes” Krysta Rodriguez (as Liza Minnelli) and Rebecca Dayan (Elsa Peretti).
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Halston-a five-part biopic from Ryan Murphy-lands on May 14, spilling the larger-than-life story of Roy Halston Frowick (known mononymously as Halston, the man who changed American fashion forever) onto our small screens.
#Halston liza minelli series#
Viewers who have lamented the lack of a fabulously chic, binge-worthy new series in the wake of 2020’s The Queen’s Gambit have a brand-new hit to look forward to this spring.