The penultimate episode of “Halston,” a five-part bio-pic series on Netflix, opens not with a bang but with a snort. It’s the late seventies, and Roy Halston Frowick is the most famous fashion designer in the United States, creating luxurious, clean-lined dresses, and hawking everything from perfume to luggage to carpeting. In a snappily edited montage, Halston arrives at Studio 54 with an entourage—including Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez) and the Italian jeweller Elsa Peretti (Rebecca Dayan)—to a cheering crowd of wannabes and paparazzi; he hosts an orgy in his Upper East Side town house; he holds a fashion show in a skyscraper overlooking midtown; he impulse-buys a beachside compound in Montauk. All of this is scored not just to a driving disco beat but to the repetitive whoosh of cocaine vanishing up Halston’s nostrils quicker than the drug can be laid out in lines. What a rush! But how long can he keep it up?
Not for long. The series, which is based on Steven Gaines’s 1991 biography of the designer, charts Halston’s dizzying rise—from a sad farm boy growing up gay in the Midwest to a Bergdorf Goodman milliner to an internationally beloved couturier—and eventual fall. After licensing his name to J. C. Penney, in 1982, Halston lost control of his business and receded from the spotlight. In 1990, he died of AIDS. The show does not dwell on Halston’s physical decline, however; it is much more interested in the designer during his most productive if self-destructive period.
The series was created by another gay Midwesterner, Ryan Murphy, one of the most prolific forces in television. Like Halston, Murphy grew up in Indiana, and his name has become synonymous with the domination of an industry. In the past couple of decades, his shows have included the Fox musical series “Glee,” the FX anthology programs “American Horror Story” and “American Crime Story,” the drag-ball drama “Pose” (also on FX), and, after he signed an estimated three-hundred-million-dollar contract with Netflix, in 2018, period shows like “Ratched” and “Hollywood.” The projects have varied in quality, but Murphy has maintained, across multiple networks, a unified artistic vision that is wholly his. Ending up like Halston is surely his worst nightmare.
Murphy’s word for the overarching tone of his shows is “baroque,” and, by that standard, “Halston” is the Platonic ideal of a Ryan Murphy show. The series is propulsive and vivid and over the top, with quick shifts between melodrama and farce. When it is revealed, in Episode 4, that “some crazy girl from Mamaroneck” died in an air vent while attempting to sneak into Studio 54, the worst part of the whole thing, Halston’s crew decides, is that the victim was wearing an outfit designed not by him but by his rival Calvin Klein.
Ewan McGregor, who portrays Halston, tears into this kind of self-absorbed cattiness with relish. “Fuck Jackie Kennedy,” he hisses in his deserted hat salon, early in the first episode. (Halston designed her Inauguration pillbox.) “She killed me—stopped wearing hats.” The acting can be a tad excessive, but this, too, is often the mark of a Murphy production, where characters who are famous in real life are portrayed by well-known actors who pour it on thick—one celebrity reproducing the tics of another. A big draw of “The People v. O. J. Simpson” was to see John Travolta “doing” the attorney Robert Shapiro. If you’re seeking a more subdued portrait of the designer, then check out Frédéric Tcheng’s documentary, “Halston,” from 2019, which captures quieter elements of the man, such as his loving relationship with his niece. If you’re looking for a good time, then turn on Murphy’s show to watch McGregor “do” Halston in a black turtleneck, slicked-back hair, and sunglasses, a cigarette cocked between his fingers as he lounges in his sunken Paul Rudolph-designed living room, a bitchy “fuck you” ready on the tip of his tongue.
Surface pleasures have plenty of appeal—there’s nothing wrong with watching good-looking people in beautiful clothes overact at each other while they drink and do drugs in gorgeous rooms—and, certainly, focussing on the shape and the look of things, rather than mining their depth, makes a lot of sense for a bio-pic about Halston, a man who seems to have lived for the superficial. Murphy’s team has made painstaking efforts to reproduce the world that the designer inhabited. In Halston’s Montauk home, the books in the bookcase were turned spines-in, presumably to achieve a more pleasingly monochromatic look, which is also how the bookcase is depicted in the show. But even Halston’s designs, known for their flowing minimalism—sometimes they were made with just a single seam—only appeared simple. In Tcheng’s documentary, a fashion curator notes that the pattern for one seemingly straightforward dress is in fact as intricate as “a Cuisinart blade.” Likewise, Halston’s psychology and his relationships must have been complex things, or at least more complex than the show would lead us to believe.
The series suggests, through a handful of Depression-era flashbacks (reminiscent, to me, of the Don Draper-as-Dick Whitman moments of “Mad Men,” always the weakest, most formulaic parts of that great show), that Halston’s original wound stems from his mother’s rough treatment at the hands of his father—a violence that seems at least partly connected to her acceptance of her son’s sexuality. “You are far too special for this place,” mother tells child, a fresh bruise on her cheek, as she admires a hat that he’s decorated for her with feathers plucked from the family’s chicken coop. Many of the lines have a tell-rather-than-show quality to them: one of Halston’s lovers says, “Men like us, we come here from some faraway place to invent ourselves, make something out of nothing.” Later, Halston refers to his circle of friends as a “bunch of queers and freaks and girls who haven’t grown up yet.” This, incidentally, is nearly all that we find out about the secondary characters, which is a shame. Dayan, as Peretti, Halston’s muse, has a nimble elegance, and David Pittu, as the illustrator Joe Eula, his right-hand man, adds some warmth to a clique that could make your blood run cold; mostly, though, they serve as buffers for McGregor’s exaggerated hauteur.
As I watched, I kept thinking back to “The Assassination of Gianni Versace”—the second installment of Murphy’s “American Crime Story” franchise—which told the tale of another of the twentieth century’s most important designers. What made that show interestingly complex, though, was not the depiction of Versace (here, too, we got flashbacks of mother counselling son, this time back in Calabria: “Success only comes with hard work . . . that’s why it’s special”) but that of his killer, Andrew Cunanan. Aside from being a murderer, Cunanan, an appearances-obsessed striver, was not unlike Halston, though the show portrayed him as much more particular in his oddity and desperation: his contentious, tortured, and often violent relationships with his parents, his friends, and his lovers felt textured and unpredictable, in a way that made for both good and compelling TV. In the new series, Murphy keeps such a tight rein on the designer’s world that Halston is unable to breathe as a subject. He never becomes truly strange or surprising.
Sick with AIDS, stripped of his business, Halston spends his final days being driven up and down the West Coast by his manservant. In the show’s last episode, the designer sits by the Pacific Ocean, wearing a white wool cardigan layered over a white turtleneck sweater, a cane in his hand. “Years ago, I’d look out there, and I’d look at the blue, and I would think, What can I do with that blue?” he recalls. “My mind would start racing, thinking about the collection I could do. . . . But now I only think about what a pretty blue it is. ” Pretty is a lot, but it isn’t enough. ♦
