HALSTON (2019)

Starring Liza Minnelli, Marisa Berenson, Joel Schumacher, Tavi Gevinson

Directed by Frédéric Tcheng

Written by Frédéric Tcheng

Distributed by The Orchard. 105 minutes. Opening this Friday at the Landmark.

Halston is as much a story of an industry as it is of an artist.

Frédéric Tcheng’s absorbing documentary unravels the career of Roy Halston Frowick, the maverick fashion designer who rose to fame in the 1970s, and illuminates how today’s celebrity-infused fashion industry took shape.

We are in no better hands to take this journey than those of Tcheng, whose editing and directing credits include Matt Tyrnauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel and Dior and I. Indeed, Halston serves as a nice bookend to Tyrnauer’s recent Studio 54, which also examines the underbelly of the 1970s disco era.

Halston chronicles the media savvy designer’s swift rise from milliner to mogul, told largely with a treasure trove of archival footage. When the film opens, the footage is being inspected by fashion blogger/actor Tavi Gevinson who plays “Chloe the narrator,” a secretary/sleuth solving a mystery as to what happened to Halston. This framing device is unnecessary as the tapes and articles coupled with recent interviews with Halston’s models (parts of his entourage known as the “Halstonettes”), business associates and famous friends such as Liza Minnelli tell the story just fine.

A camera crew forever in tow, Halston crafted his public image with the same attention he gave his designs. His genius was creating diaphanous dresses shaped effortlessly around the body, making clothes that flattered a variety of body sizes. As Minnelli notes: “Halston’s clothes danced with you.” The designer first got attention as the Bergdorf Goodman milliner who designed Jackie Kennedy’s famous pillbox worn at her husband’s inauguration. Soon, Halston was dressing the rich and powerful from head to toe, becoming one of the first public faces of a fashion brand.

But when Halston started, designers were largely in the background. While he is credited with creating many of the masks worn at Truman Capote’s famed black-and-white ball of 1966, the designer was notably absent from the guest list. He would make sure that he was not left on the sidelines again. Halston’s frequent cavorting with Andy Warhol, Cher, Liz Taylor, Bianca Jagger and others who haunted the famed Studio 54 got him headlines and turned him into a media darling.

While his high fashion and flamboyance put him on the map, his ready-to-wear line and airline uniforms introduced him to the masses. Halston wanted to create “clothes for a modern time” and his boundless ambition led him in directions that most high-end designers wouldn’t dare go: One of the film’s key arcs centers on his decision in 1983 to create a line for J.C. Penney, which was met with disdain by the industry.

Indeed, it’s Halston’s business ventures rather than his personal or artistic choices that dominate the film’s second half. We don’t get too many insights about what made him tick, and only a hint of the discrimination he may have experienced as a gay man mingling with high society in the 1960s. Instead, a lot of time is spent examining how his fortunes rose and fell at the hands of his corporate overlords. While conglomerate Norton Simon enabled him to unfurl his eponymous fashion empire to stretch from fragrance to luggage, his later rocky partnership with Esmark, which marketed Playtex, resulted in the end of his career.

Halston succumbed to AIDS in 1990, not living to see his brand’s impact. It’s easy to see from whom the celebrity-branded lines that dominate big-box retailers took their cue. A fleeting image of Sarah Jessica Parker at the end of Halston reminds us that the lines have been permanently blurred: the actress/designer briefly stepped in to help run Halston Heritage, the line that continues to this day. Halston no doubt would have approved.