Hal­ston

Fol­low­ing Diana Vree­land: The Eye Has to Trav­el and Dior and I, Hal­ston com­pletes a hat-trick of fash­ion-cen­tric doc­u­men­taries writ­ten, edit­ed and direct­ed by French-born film­mak­er, Frédéric Tcheng.

Roy Hal­ston Frow­ick, known sim­ply as Hal­ston, was an Amer­i­can fash­ion design­er who rose from Iowa ori­gins to inter­na­tion­al house­hold name sta­tus in the 1970s. As one talk­ing head describes it, ​“ele­gance and ease” were at the fore­front of his min­i­mal­ist women’s cloth­ing, ​“and a sense of own­ing pow­er with­out being mas­cu­line and hon­our­ing the body you have.” Halston’s work is attrib­uted with cre­at­ing a relaxed urban lifestyle for women in the fall­out of the pre­ced­ing decade’s social rev­o­lu­tions, allow­ing them to be ​“free” inside their clothes.

He was known for his social sphere as much as his designs, becom­ing one of the fig­ures to help make Stu­dio 54 the cul­tur­al force that it was, along­side close friends Liza Min­nel­li and Andy Warhol, with whom he was reg­u­lar­ly pho­tographed at the night­club. Through new and archive inter­views, the film shows how Hal­ston shaped the lives of those peo­ple and oth­ers, and how he lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly shaped the fash­ion world dur­ing his time in and out of the spot­light before his untime­ly death, aged 57, in 1990. He was one of a num­ber of high-pro­file fig­ures to die of HIV-relat­ed ill­ness­es at the tail end of the Repub­li­can Party’s years of cru­el pub­lic indif­fer­ence to the AIDS epidemic.

Hal­ston the doc­u­men­tary isn’t focused sole­ly on this tragedy, though it does take a sig­nif­i­cant inter­est in the cau­tion­ary tale of a super­star artist sell­ing his brand and name rights to Wall Street; fear­less­ly charg­ing into a new world of afford­able fash­ion with­out any clear sense of direc­tion, bring­ing his loy­al team along and work­ing them hard to make the tran­si­tion a success.

What sets Tcheng’s film apart from most fash­ion doc­u­men­taries is how it is framed almost like a finan­cial thriller, with moody re-enact­ments and a fram­ing device with a fic­tion­al nar­ra­tor (Tavi Gevin­son) dig­ging through archives while clad in Halston’s finest. This even­tu­al­ly weary­ing device ulti­mate­ly doesn’t deliv­er any insights that aren’t con­veyed in a more com­pelling, uh, fash­ion by the more con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary sto­ry­telling of the film’s main body.