When I met Halston, I just remember him talking and me listening…he’d say, ‘Alright, I got it’”.
Halston did the same, like a clock: four times a year he made her a pair of black velvet trousers. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “my father would give me five costumes every year.” It was a genuine love, because he reminded her of her father, the film director Vincent Minnelli, the artist behind Meet Me in St Louis, in which her mother starred. So, it is ecstasy to see Minnelli made young in Halston even if, with the emphasis on their friendship – she is the more functional helpmeet, the “girlfriend”– much of their separate and shared art is lost, in the race to make them relatable for Netflix’s global audience.
(Only her mother comes close, with The Man That Got Away. He dressed her for Mein Herr and Maybe This Time, which is the best song on film. And Halston, uncredited, made her costumes for it. If she was telling her mother’s story, she surpassed it. She was so open and so childlike her yearning for the spotlight destroyed her. (Her famous performance at his fashion show at Versailles though, when he was terrified of competing with other American designers, is accurate.) Their first meeting is changed: in life, an appointment was made after she admired some of his designs in Bloomingdale’s department store, while in Halston he is watching her perform in a supper-club, to establish her as a singer. But I wonder, again, if framing Minnelli’s relationship with Halston as the central love story is right – it feels like framing for those who are not interested in the reality of gay love, which is portrayed as abusive, but just want to see beautiful clothes with famous people inside them. (He repudiated his other muse, the heiress and jewellery designer Elsa Peretti, whose work for Tiffany & Company is in the British Museum and who died this year). No, the colour here is provided by Minnelli, one of the few friends Halston did not reject. When Halston was alive – he died of Aids in 1990, at 57, having sold his name - it wouldn’t have been made. I suspect the truth – Halston was an artist, infinitely more daring than Ralph Lauren and his self-hating WASP chic – was more complicated. Halston is written as a tragedy, a cautionary tale. I am nervous watching a man be reduced to the misery induced by his sexual preferences and Halston is so wracked that the freedom and colour he gave women is – and this is absurd - slightly muted. Halston it is likewise sanitised: quite often it is glib. There is a tendency to sanitise biopics of gay men, to make them palatable: Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, a gay man’s story written by his bewildered straight colleagues and Elton John in the self-serving Rocketman.
So is his fall: to drug addiction, to sex addiction, to heartbreak, and to Studio 54, the brief-flowering New York City nightclub that defined the decadence of the late 1970s in America. (I think he was trying to sound like Orson Welles and I don’t blame him.īut he was born in Dees Moines, Iowa). It details Halston’s rise from Jackie Kennedy’s milliner – he made the pillbox hat she wore to her husband’s inauguration - to couturier to pusher of cheap mass fashion, and McGregor does a fair impersonation of his contradictions, his expressions – under the sunglasses he always wore - and his ridiculous voice.
The show isn’t as creative as the man it is named for: how could it be? Netflix is gaudy and well-funded, but it is not imaginative, as its subjects were.
HALSTON AND LIZA MINELLI SERIES
Minnelli is in Halston from Netflix, a new five-part series about the most original designer America ever produced, with the ever-watchable Ewan McGregor as her best friend Roy (Halston) Frowick. I didn’t care for Sex and the City and its grasping archetype hags – it was consumerist Feminism, empty Feminism - but it is right in this sense, if only by coincidence or mistake. It is a truism – and a joke from the Sex and the City 2 – that whenever there is a peak of gay energy in any room, Liza Minnelli automatically appears.