Halston: This Town's Been Wearing Tatters

Nostalgia is dangerous ground. Without signs that read "Proceed with caution," there's a real risk of sinking up to one's neck in mawkishness and ridicule. It happens all the time in fashion; the creative becomes the freakish and the sublime turns into the sentimental.

Take Ultrasuede, for instance. This wash-and-wear synthetic found its most advantageous employment in No. 704, a shirt-dress ür-fashion designed by the late Roy Halston Frowick.

In the 1970s, Halston the designer became so indelibly linked with celebrity disco culture that it was impossible to separate the man from the media machine. He dressed them all, fat or thin: Bianca, Liz, Liza, Babe, Jackie, Nan. He dressed them in the straight and narrow and he dressed them in the bulbous and billow. Bianca wore a red Halston when she rode her white horse onto the dance floor of Studio 54 and Liz donned the same bright hue to roll her large landmass across the cover of People.

The Halston manifesto was ubiquity draped in a special brand of American decadence. Wearing a Halston jersey or Ultrasuede dress meant that one sacrificed one's individuality to the uniform needs of the herd. It also meant acknowledging that idiosyncrasy wasn't always a viable stylistic option.

Women who wore Halston were not meek, diffident types. They wore the arrogance of remove at a time when looking disinterested was the chicest accessory of all and materialism the next best thing. Manhattan was their snowglobe, a toy biosphere turned white by the powder of cocaine.

The party lasted until they pulled the money from the walls. Uncle Sam has a bad habit of breaking up even the most exclusive revelries, and when the curtain came down, it stayed down. By 1980, everything that could be snorted, shot, or sexed had been, repeatedly. Even the media, which had breathlessly tried to crown Halston the first "international" designer (and one with a Made in the USA label--Iowa! firmly attached), couldn't put the spin back in the supercilious groove.

Halston never wanted his name to appear on something he himself had not designed. Were he alive today, he would likely marvel at how that name continues to be tossed from from designer to designer in an attempt to restore its former high gloss. In 1973, Halston traded "Halston" for commercial opportunism, while failing to understand that licensing was the biggest play in the game.

Halston the man might also not recognize how fashion has tattered to the point where the classics border on becoming white elephants. The stalwarts of American ready-to-wear are slowly being relegated to the sidelines in favor of hip, young lines whose trademarks are increasingly gloomy tropes. This has resulted in a huge division of customer: the artistically hungry young and that dwindling number of mature adults who prefer their art to hang in the Guggenheim.

Halston the label is back--again--this time under the direction of Marco Zanini, who admitted that his first outing with the label would be necessarily "banal." Zanini has the Herculean task of restoring the label to past significance while at the same time erasing any lingering shame over the J. C. Penney association (a shortsighted financial alliance that Halston himself enthusiastically approved and which cost him his reputation).

Underlying all of this were the twin expectations of legacy and development, somewhat tired demands that began when the label was first brokered thirty-five years ago.

Zanini's shrewdness had him deliberately detour around the emotion of the original label, which is best expressed in a quote by the artist André Breton: "Beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas." Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all. In avoiding the passion and eroticism implicit in the label's history, however, he created a collection of ellipsis.

Admittedly, while leaving Studio 54 behind there was nevertheless the dance of obligation. The seamless drape of the original was carefully represented, as were neutral fabrics the color of chimney swifts. Zanini showed separates and an open-collared, nubby coat with rope-styled belt. And then he veered into that dangerous sentimental ground: his evening dresses, onesies, and muumus too closely evoked Liz Taylor's bulk-covering schmattes. A model like Pat Ast would have sold their droopiness with one bravura walk, but today's bird-thin counterparts were simply engulfed.

Even in these more rigid times, the key to reviving Halston is personality. Personality is not persona. It appears as if the need to permanently end the Studio 54 hangover caused Zanini to design a collection that was just this side of steam-distilled. One appreciates Zanini's slim margin of error and waits to see what he can do in the future, but for now he leaves us with...

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Images: Style.com
People cover provided by IMELDA
Title lyrics from "Shattered," The Rolling Stones