Halston was a dream gig for costume designer Jeriana San Juan. In Netflix’s five-part, fictionalized series documenting the American designer’s spectacular rise and fall from the ’50s through the ’90s, the man who invented American glamour gets the Ryan Murphy treatment, and the result is a lush, heady, louche portrait of Roy Halston Frowick and his legacy. “I was intimidated by it,” says San Juan over the phone, days after the highly anticipated series dropped last Friday. “But it was the perfect place for creativity to thrive.”

San Juan, who is known for her costuming work on The Get Down and The Plot Against America, was charged with translating Halston for a new generation, many of whom know his name only from a dusty perfume bottle in their mother’s medicine cabinet. “Halston’s work was revered by fashion insiders but beyond that, his name and legacy had really faded from the collective zeitgeist,” says San Juan, who herself graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

NetflixEwan McGregor as Halston with Rebecca Dayan as his muse Elsa Peretti

 She began her research by looking at designers who influenced Halston—he looked up to American couturier Charles James, and his contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol. She also researched designers who were in turn influenced by Halston. “Tom Ford’s revival of Gucci in the ’90s was my gateway in,” she says of Ford’s sexy velvet and silk collections that called to mind Halston’s disco heyday. 

San Juan pored through the Condé Nast and Women’s Wear Daily archives, looking for images of both famous and everyday women on the street wearing Halston. The designer made his name by dressing his famous entourage—muses, actresses and socialites—in made-to-measure couture. Liza Minnelli and Elsa Peretti, who are featured heavily in the series, wore his clothes exclusively.

NetflixLiza Minnelli played by Krysta Rodriguez

Halston was also one of the first designers to democratize fashion, with the ubiquitous Ultrasuede shirtdress of the ’70s. Going mass was a feat of self-branding that saw the man from Iowa get his name plastered on everything from luggage to sunglasses, socks to an accessibly priced line at JCPenney. An early adopter of what is now common empire-building practice, Halston saw his name lose cachet for doing so at the time. As the series explores, he even lost the rights to his name when his backers lost faith, and went on to lose his way both in his work and his personal life, a process expedited by his notorious substance-abuse issues.

San Juan designed some 1,200 costumes for the series, recreating iconic items such as the metallic sequin gowns for the famous Battle of Versailles fundraiser fashion show in Paris that pitted American design stars against French legends. Some pieces she created herself in the designer’s style. She also went to town on the vintage market, hauling in many pieces from dealers and private collections.

In my own closet is a vintage Halston gown, one-shoulder goddess-style in canary yellow, complete with red wine stains along on the hem. I clearly have had a good time in that dress. San Juan laughs when she hears this. “Yes! So many pieces weren’t in great shape. It was the most hilarious thing. Dresses that came from personal friends who were willing to loan me their pieces, they had cigarette holes and wine stains!” This is a very good thing, she concludes. “It is just so reflective of the way Halston made women feel. What is so incredible about his clothes is that they really celebrate women. They have this effortlessly Grecian-like ease to them, a ’70s disco energy.” The sensuousness of the fabrics Halston used, she says, made comfort look and feel glamorous, a precursor to the ease you see in American sportswear.

NetflixRecreation of the famous Battle of Versailles fundraiser

San Juan also dressed the show’s editors, the money men, the disco throngs and the people on the street in the background. The show depicts many different fashion periods, but Halston’s clothes are so timeless and sophisticated that you can’t really pin a date on them. “The greatest challenge was how do we really get a sense of what year it is on a storytelling level,” she says. “We created a canvas for those pieces to live on.” By this she means she worked with the set designer to dress extras—such as the women in the tented showroom when the tie-dye collection was shown—in trendy period pieces. “I found myself in the ’60s and ’70s scenes exploring as much pattern as possible, in colours of those periods—very dated avocado greens and pumpkin oranges.” This provided a contrast to the solid, bold colours that Halston favoured in his designs, and the people in the backdrop then looked “outdated” beside the Halston clothes. “It brought an appreciation to modern audiences of how revolutionary Halston’s ideas were,” San Juan explains.

To highlight Halston’s technical wizardry, San Juan first had to teach Ewan McGregor, who portrays Halston, the basics of design and how a designer moves in the studio. As a fashion nerd, I held my breath watching McGregor free-cut into fabric onscreen. “That moment in the script just read: Halston creates a dress on Elsa [Peretti, his muse who became a Tiffany jewellery designer, and who died earlier this year aged 80]. We had to create something, and it couldn’t be an original Halston. We took creative license and I decided on a bias one-seam caftan,” San Juan says. “We had to illustrate that for the audience.” (If you’re wondering, a bias cut is that stretch of drape between the cross grain and the straight grain.) It took a lot of reverse engineering to work out how to cut the cloth exactly where it would highlight the model’s bone structure, shoulder to shoulder.

“With very simple cuts he did something revelatory, ” she says. “We wanted to wrap all of these ideas of Halston into one dress so the audience would have the opportunity to see different elements of artistry in one moment. We wanted to gain the respect of the audience—the non-fashion crowd—for Halston’s skill.”

NetflixEwan McGregor as Halston wearing his staple black cashmere turtleneck

San Juan also charted Halston’s own sartorial journey to reflect his rise and fall. He had a deceptively simple uniform—relying heavily on a black cashmere turtleneck, which, mark my words, will be influential in men’s and womenswear this year, elevated beyond the Steve Jobs uniform with this revival. But everything Halston wore was carefully thought out. (Fun fact: His pants had no side seams.) San Juan brought on Halston’s own in-house tailor to work on outfits for McGregor. Watch for how Halston’s universe—his clothing, his apartment, his offices—turns red in the series as he slips into despair, adding dramatic urgency as his life falls apart.

San Juan also spent time with friends and colleagues of Halston’s to get to know the man behind the fashion as much as possible, “the very sweet, charming person,” as she says. She cites the “merry band of muses, his creative family,” who were such an important part of Halston’s atelier and working process: not just Minnelli and Peretti, but Pat Cleveland, Pat Ast, Alva Chinn and Anjelica Huston.

“He was very democratic and very modern in his thinking and the way he looked at inclusivity,” she says. “He had models of all shapes and sizes and colours. It’s something we take for granted now, but he was a pioneer of that.” This modernity is what makes San Juan think Halston’s image and influence will be making a big comeback. “He’s very relevant. Women will always want to feel like they do when wearing a Halston.” The upcoming Met Gala, which will  be a celebration of American fashion, is likely to “help extend and perpetuate his true artistic legacy beyond the screen.” 

Watching the clothes shine in the thrumming, sweaty, achingly glamorous nightclub scenes set at Studio 54 is particularly poignant in this lockdown era. “We are renewing our own existence right now,” says San Juan. “Halston’s clothes represent feeling free and celebrating that.” Red wine stains and all.

 

    More Fashion and Film