Watch an Exclusive Clip of Halston Before Its Sundance Premiere—And Read What the Director and Producer Say About Its Making

Halston, at home, with Betsy Theodoracopulos, seated, and Elsa Peretti, both in his designs.Photographed by Deborah Turbeville, Vogue, February 1975

Roy Halston Frowick, the American designer known simply as Halston, was glamour personified. Tall and handsome, trim and tan, he wore a tuxedo with the same ease as he did his signature black turtlenecks. The Halston look extended to his Paul Rudolph–designed townhouse and his mirrored and orchid-filled Olympic Tower headquarters, and to his luxuriously pliant, easy-looking designs. It extended even to his entourage, the Halstonettes, who always seemed to be living on top of the world, whether they were touring China, at the Battle of Versailles, or dancing the night away at Studio 54.

Two models in hand-painted silks by Halston.Photographed by Deborah Turbeville, Vogue, December 1975

Despite Halston’s success, Halston, a new documentary premiering at Sundance, suggests that, to his detriment, the designer was way, way ahead of his time with innovations, both aesthetic and corporate, that the fashion world was not ready to accept. It’s not necessary to be familiar with Halston’s story to become engrossed by the film, which was directed by Frédéric Tcheng, of Dior and I fame, produced by Roland Ballester, and executive produced by T Dog Productions and CNN Films, but it can’t hurt, either. In brief, Halston moved to Chicago in 1952, where he worked as a window dresser and established himself as a milliner. Five years later, he landed in New York to work with Lilly Daché, a leading hat firm. From there, he became head of the millinery department at Bergdorf Goodman, the uptown, and upscale, department store. He famously designed the pink pillbox hat Jacqueline Kennedy wore to the 1961 inauguration. By 1968, he was designing clothes and opened his own custom shop on Madison Avenue, which attracted the Warhol crowd and the well-heeled alike. Ready-to-wear soon followed. Known for the easy but pure minimalism of his design, Halston had become a household name by 1973, when he sold his business to Norton Simon. Ten years later, he signed a historic licensing deal (to the tune of about $1 billion) with J. C. Penney. That same year, Norton Simon was acquired by Esmark, in the first of several changeovers, each of which saw Halston’s role diminished. His efforts to reacquire his company failed. In 1988, he was diagnosed with AIDS and died of complications from the disease two years later.

Model in Halston’s mushroom hat.Photographed by Horst P. Horst, Vogue, August 15, 1962

A résumé, of course, is hardly revelatory of character, and Tcheng found Halston, the man, to be exceptionally elusive. “He never talked about himself,” the director says. On top of that, Halston’s reputation for tantrums and cocaine-fueled excesses are ripe for sensationalism. That’s the well-trod, easy route, and one that Tcheng refreshingly avoided. Not that he’s painted Halston as an angel, exactly. The director’s aim was to create a “kaleidoscopic portrait” of the man, by tracing, through thousands of documents, his business trail. Tcheng interviewed both executives at the companies that owned Halston’s business, as well as his intimates. Though the director states he’s “definitely pro-Halston,” the film is fairly balanced, with both sides having their say.

Like all good films, Halston transcends its nominal subject; the designer’s story is also that of big business versus creatives. Despite his allegiance to Halston, Tcheng rejects labeling these opposing forces as good and evil; it’s more complicated than that. Enter Carl Epstein, a business executive charged with “cleaning up” Halston’s business, who is given a good percentage of screen time. “Carl,” explains Tcheng, was not like the other businessmen, but existed somewhere between the creative and the corporate side of things, much as Halston did.

Lauren Hutton in Halston’s silk-jersey sarong-wrapped halter dress.Photographed by Francesco Scavullo, Vogue, September 1975

Part of what makes Halston’s story “devastating,” from the point of view of the director (and this viewer) is that he has never gotten his due. Halston’s innovations—creating easy, unstructured designs via exquisite engineering—remain the inspirational bedrock of American design. Similarly, Halston’s business sense, both in terms of licensing and his democratic belief that luxury and masstige could coexist, were prescient but also way in advance of an industry that still segregated high and low design. Halston clearly pioneered many concepts that are taken for granted today. Halston the film is revelatory, laudatory (to a point), and instructive. If there’s a moral to the story, says Tcheng, it’s that “you have to try; you have to keep trying. That’s how you make things new, and that’s what Halston did.”

Here, an exclusive clip cut for Vogue, and excerpts from a conversation about the film with Frédéric Tcheng and Roland Ballester.

How did this project originate?
Roland Ballester: [Its] roots go back many, many years. I know Halston’s niece and nephew. I knew generalities about Halston, [but] I really didn’t know anything about the genius of the design, or why it was important aesthetically. I knew that he was famous, and I knew he had a reputation for Studio 54, and beyond that I knew just about what anyone else knew, which was not a lot. Then, [about] five years ago, I started looking deeper into the story and found out that there was a real person behind it. The thing about Halston was that he gave such a perfect image—and that was great for the marketing—but I think over time it worked to his detriment, just as the simplicity of his clothes [did]. That [image] is all people could focus on. When someone’s so perfect and things look so easy, it’s not that interesting of a story, but then I started to realize that [Halston was] a very complex man, an incredibly talented man, who went through not just incredible highs, but incredible struggles. I realized that, yes, there’s a fantastic dramatic story here; let’s tell that story.

Frédéric Tcheng: When I started doing the research, the business story really [was] what gripped me. The way that his empire was taken away from him by this corporation in ’83/’84, I don’t know, it just devastated me. I think it resonated personally because I’ve had experiences with corporations that were sort of difficult to manage. I was interested in talking about the relationship between creative people and the business world and how you can manage that in an industry that is both an art and commerce. The Halston story was perfect in the sense that forces are still playing out today—in terms of the ruthlessness of corporate logic—that were formed in the early ’80s with Ronald Reagan coming into power and starting to deregulate the financial markets [that] resulted in these big conglomerates sort of ruling over the business world. You can see all of that in the Halston story, so to me, it was a way of exploring the world we live in today through an origin story.

Viviane Fauny in a black sequin pantsuit from Halston.Photographed by Irving Penn, Vogue, September 1, 1972

You managed to avoid sensationalism without making Halston out to be a saint. . . .
F.T.: We definitely didn’t want to whitewash the story at all. I was compelled to try to get to know Halston, and he’s not an easy guy to get to know because he never talked about himself. He constructed his persona from A to Z—with the glasses, and the uniform, and the sort of accent, and all of that. That was really fascinating to me; it’s a true American story of a self-made man. I’m someone who’s very curious, so if you give me someone who doesn’t really want to reveal too much, I’m going to start digging and digging. I found that really exciting, not just from a psychological point of view, but also the business story, [which] was very much like a thriller. There were antagonists, there was a memo war, everything was documented in these legal memos, and that’s how I started shaping the film.

Beverly Johnson in Halston’s black silk-organza dress accessorized with Elsa Peretti jewelry.Photographed by Arthur Elgort, Vogue, October 1980

Can you talk about your casting of Tavi Gevinson as narrator?
F.T.: You have to think of Tavi as an investigator. She’s primarily a surrogate for me and I projected onto her a lot of how I felt about Halston, and at the end of the day, I am pro-Halston. I’m totally pro-Halston. When I started looking at references for how to create a complex portrait of someone who I felt was hard to know, Citizen Kane came to mind. It’s one of my favorite films—and a lot of people’s favorite films, I guess—and it’s just a brilliant, brilliant portrayal of [character]. Orson Welles sends you on this investigation with his journalist and you get a lot of good stories, a lot of great chapters, but at the end of the day, there’s no “rosebud.” But still, at the center of it is this sort of kaleidoscopic notion of a portrait.

Angora and wool tied shirt and cashmere pants, by Halston. Elsa Peretti necklaces.Photographed by David Bailey, Vogue, January 1, 1972

Did your impressions of Halston change during the making of the film?
F.T.: When I first started I had a lot of doubts about who he was; there was so much mystery in everything. But after doing this research, it was undeniable to me that Halston was a force for good: The work he did in the ’70s, the way he used models of color, the way he used models of all sizes. . . . I mean, do you see a designer today that has a Pat Ast [a curvaceous Warhol actress and Halston model] in the showroom? It was really fascinating and very appealing to me the way he kind of challenged a lot of the norms. Yes, he had some excesses, and yes, he did believe his own press, and there were maybe too many sycophants around him, but yes, I am pro-Halston. He’s a major genius of American culture and he’s not getting the recognition—not nearly the recognition—[he deserves]. Part of the tragedy for me is how his legacy is getting erased, starting with the corporation erasing his tapes. He hasn’t gotten his due. I feel it’s unjust how Halston was never really recognized for his contribution to fashion. Fashion history tends to gravitate toward people with big artistic statements and he was always very discreet and very restrained in his approach, but you can see the work that he did in the clothes we wear all the time now.

Andy Warhol mentioned Halston over and over in his diaries, so it was especially fascinating to see the footage you have of Warhol in Halston’s domain.
F.T.: Halston and Warhol are very similar—that’s what we tried to show in the film. They were two gay men who came out of the Midwest. Both of them had purely American stories, and they both struck this weird balance of intriguing a lot but not saying much.
R.B.: I would also add that Halston doesn’t get as much credit as Andy gets, but Halston created a whole universe around himself. Warhol is very famous for the superstars; Halston did something very similar in his way [with the Halstonettes].

Halston, bottom left, and models in his designs.Photographed by Duane Michals, Vogue, December 1, 1972

What did you want to accomplish by interviewing the businessmen?
F.T.: I wanted to include them because to me the heart of the story was the business unraveling. There’s a certain arrogance to some of the business talk, [which is] also [often] mistaken as kind of plain-talking. You see it with the American president, it’s that vein of tough-talking businessman. I think that [guise] very often covers a lot of not-so-tasteful feelings for creative people especially, so that was a way of talking about that. Now, when you talk about Carl [Epstein], Carl is a very special character to me. I think he stands apart from regular businessmen and I think that’s why his showdown with Halston was so dramatic and takes so much space in the film. To me, Carl is just as complex as Halston. He’s a businessman, but as you can see, there’s a part of him that’s also very soft and very creative—at some point he even tried to write a book about Halston. Carl is someone who has this very strange, conflicted relationship with Halston; there’s a lot of projection, a lot of sort of seduction, a lot of unrequited love, if you want to call it that, at some point. The relationship turns sour, but there’s a honeymoon that lasts quite a while.

Naomi Sims in Halston.Photographed by Duane Michals, Vogue, June 1, 1972

Were you trying to establish a dichotomy between good (creatives) and bad (big business)?
F.T.: What was interesting about the business story line for me, it wasn’t good against evil, it was really much more complex and shaded than that because Carl comes in and there’s a period of one year when you don’t even know what’s going to happen, you don’t really know who’s playing who, or if anybody’s playing anyone, or if anybody’s earnest. Reading through these memos—we had thousands of pages of memos from Carl but also other businessmen and the lawyers—it was like reading a detective novel. It was like who’s playing who, when? I don’t really know. People changed their story constantly. For me, it was super engrossing just to dig into that and make sense of it and to try to confront people with their own sort of lies like I do with the lawyer, for example, when he’s [talking] about the lock change, or with Carl, confronting him with some of her inadequacies. But you know, Carl, we were all really fond of him. He passed away this summer.

Models in Halston’s Fall 1975 collection.Photographed by Duane Michals, Vogue, September 1975

What were your impressions of Halston’s clothes?
F.T.: I come from an engineering background—I’m a civil engineer by training, so I’m fascinated by construction—and I was just blown away by the simplicity of the patterns and how Halston was a designer in the truest sense of the word. A designer really cares about how things are designed. To top that, Halston would never talk about the simplicity of the ingenuity of the design. I think if you go to any store today, half of the dresses are just kind of Halston’s ideas. If you want to think of it in more positive terms for Halston, his legacy is elsewhere; it’s in other people’s brands. You would never have a Michael Kors without Halston, for example, or a Tom Ford.

Photographed by Horst P. Horst / Courtesy of the Horst Estate

What was Halston’s relationship to the past?
F.T.: I asked Lesley [Halston’s niece] that question; I would probe her, like, “How did he feel about what happened?” She said Halston never talked about what had happened; he was not someone who was introspective like that. The only time [he said something] was when they were watching The Karen Carpenter Story on TV, and he turned to her and said, “If I had to do it all over again, there are certain decisions I would do differently.” That’s it. Leslie did not ask more and he didn’t say more.

R.B.: The thing about the Halston story that really gets to me, even after spending so many years with it in so much detail, is just the scope of a life. How one life can be so big and yet so personal, have such sweeping moments and such intimate moments, too. I think that’s something everybody goes through to various degrees. In that journey, there are unpleasant things, no doubt, but there’s a beauty to life. As Liza [Minnelli] said in the film, Halston loved life, and you could tell that about him. That’s something that I hope people come away with.

F.T.: I think Liza is the key to the film. I chose that song, “Yes,” and I put it right in the middle of the film when Halston’s signing his name over to Norton Simon, which a lot of people think was the worst decision. But, you know, I wanted to keep the film positive because I don’t see Halston as a victim, even though [his story] is a tragedy. What I come away with is that he tried his best. Liza Minnelli sings, “You have to say yes to life and you will never win if you never play,” or “nothing’s gained if nothing’s tried.” If there’s a moral to the story for me, that is it: You have to try—you have to keep trying. That’s how you make things new, and that’s what Halston did. He was so ahead of his time on so many levels.

This interview has been edited and condensed.