Back to Blog
Liza minelli halston6/21/2023 ”The creation of the bottle in the third hour, that’s very interesting,” he said. Minahan said there was a purpose behind focusing on the perfume packaging. is recounted in the series’ third episode and serves as a harbinger of things to come. His insistence on the design - in conflict with the brand’s owner, Norton Simon Inc. The bottle itself may have been designed by Elsa Peretti (portrayed in the series by Rebecca Dayan, who started her own very successful career designing jewelry pieces that appeared in his runway shows), but it marked Halston’s first major brand extension. Penney collection, to give us an opportunity to show his creative process and his creative genius and then all of the maelstrom of the drama around him.” “So each episode is, like, the first collection, or it’s the creation of the fragrance, or it’s the Battle of Versailles, or the J.C. “My idea was to structure it around all the different collections or creations of Halston,” Minahan said. Turning it into a five-part series allowed the narrative to stretch over multiple periods of Halston’s life, Minahan said. Initially conceived as a feature film, with some false starts along the way, it evolved into a limited series at the suggestion of Minahan’s producing partner on the project, Christine Vachon of Killer Films. It seemed like a really archetypal American story.” “The hook for me was this idea of someone coming to New York, creating this made-up name, building it into an empire and then being stripped of his name and company - he couldn’t be Halston anymore. “I read it and I was so struck by it that I started reading other things about Halston and this world,” Minahan said. The genesis for “Halston” would take shape years later, in his 20s, after reading Gaines’ Vanity Fair article that later developed into “Simply Halston.” “Halston,” premiering Friday on Netflix, is a passion project 20-some years in the making for executive producer and director Dan Minahan, whose fascination with the New York scene inhabited by Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Halston and Victor Hugo came from reading Interview magazine and After Dark magazine as a gay kid in the suburbs of Connecticut. Whatever the reason, Halston’s life seems to be perennially ripe for exploration in books (including Steven Gaines’ “Simply Halston”) and documentaries (most recently in 2010 and again in 2019). Or maybe it’s because the dramatic arc of his career from anonymity to high-flying celebrity designer to scandal-page fodder makes him seem like a victim of Me Decade cancel culture. Maybe that’s because his career, now more than three decades in the rearview mirror, still feels so contemporary, both in terms of his aesthetic - riffs on his shirtdress are everywhere and when haven’t caftans been a thing? - and his business strategy - including the once-novel concepts of brand extensions and diffusion lines. ![]() If you're wondering if the costumes and designs in Halston are accurate, take a look ahead to see actual pictures of everything that went down in Versailles in 1973.Halston, the mononymous American fashion designer whose stripped-back, body-freeing take on luxury - caftans, halter dresses and acres of Ultrasuede - was a defining look of the ’70s, continues to fascinate. Needless to say, the showcase really did exist and essentially kicked off the tradition of Paris Fashion Week. And yes, Josephine Baker and Liza Minnelli were very much in attendance! It was a bit of a faceoff as well, with American designers Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, Halston, and Stephen Burrows going up against French icons Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Emanuel Ungaro, and Marc Bohan. ![]() Featuring the very best of American and French fashion, the event was meant to be a fundraiser to restore the Palace of Versailles. Although it's relatively unknown outside of the style world, the Battle of Versailles switched up the industry forever. In episode two of Netflix's Halston, fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert (Kelly Bishop) pressures Halston ( Ewan McGregor) to participate in the Battle of Versailles Fashion Show in 1973. Image Source: Getty / Bettmann / Contributor
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |