On the evening of November 28, 1973, in the Royal Opera of the Palace of Versailles, five American fashion designers showed thirty-six models against five French couture houses in a charity fashion show conceived by the New York publicist Eleanor Lambert to raise restoration funds for the palace. The French side was a roster of the most famous houses on earth: Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, and Marc Bohan for Christian Dior. The American side was a roster most of the seven hundred guests had never heard of: Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, and Stephen Burrows. Princess Grace of Monaco was in the audience. So were Andy Warhol, the Duchess of Windsor, and the photographer Bill Cunningham, who took notes. Liza Minnelli, Rudolf Nureyev, and a sixty-seven-year-old Josephine Baker performed.
The French houses showed first, with elaborate sets and classical music, in the tradition that had defined haute couture since Charles Frederick Worth opened the first Paris house in 1858. The Americans showed second, in roughly thirty-five minutes, with no sets at all, a Liza Minnelli opening number, eleven Black models on a runway that had previously held almost none, and music by Barry White, Al Green, and Aretha Franklin. The audience gave the Americans a standing ovation. The Duchess of Windsor was reported to have thrown her program in the air. The French press the next morning called it the night American fashion came of age.
The forty-one-year-old former milliner from Des Moines at the center of the American team was Roy Halston Frowick. He was already the most famous designer in the United States. Within a decade he would sign a deal that destroyed everything he had built.
The Battle of Versailles
What happened at Versailles was not a runway show. It was a generational transfer of power. For more than a century, Paris had dictated what women wore, in what materials, at what price, on what schedule. American designers worked in sportswear and ready-to-wear, which the French considered subordinate categories. Eleanor Lambert, who had co-founded the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1962, had spent a decade trying to convince the French to take American designers seriously. She had been told politely no. The Versailles benefit, organized by Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild and the palace curator Gerald Van der Kemp, gave her the opening. She picked five Americans who represented different registers: Blass for tailoring, Klein for sportswear, de la Renta for couture, Burrows for street-influenced color, and Halston for minimalism.
The French production ran nearly three hours and used set pieces, classical orchestra, and full court dress. The American show was set up to fail. The production team had no time, half the budget, and a partial set destroyed in transit. The Americans abandoned the set, performed against a bare white background, and let the clothes carry the show. Halston’s segment featured fluid jersey, halter necklines, and caftans. The clothes moved with the bodies wearing them, which the French clothes, structurally engineered to hold a fixed silhouette, did not. The Americans ran thirty-five minutes. The French ran three hours. Halston walked off the Versailles stage with international standing he had not had walking on. Within months, his name was on the cover of Newsweek under the title “The premier fashion designer of all America.”
Iowa to Bergdorf
Halston had not been on track to design clothes. He had been on track to design hats. Roy Halston Frowick was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on April 23, 1932, the son of a Norwegian-American accountant. The family moved to Evansville, Indiana, when he was fourteen. After Benjamin Bosse High School he briefly attended Indiana University, then transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied fine art and worked as a window dresser at Carson Pirie Scott. In 1953, at twenty-one, he opened a small hat business in the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. His first customer was the radio actress Fran Allison. By 1957 he had a shop on North Michigan Avenue with clients including Kim Novak, Gloria Swanson, and Deborah Kerr.
In late 1957 the celebrated French-American milliner Lilly Daché brought him to New York. Within a year he was Daché’s co-designer. Within two he had moved across town to Bergdorf Goodman, the Fifth Avenue department store, as head milliner for its custom millinery salon. He became the first designer Bergdorf allowed to put his own name in his hats. His clientele expanded to Lauren Bacall, Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, and a senator’s wife from Massachusetts named Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. On January 20, 1961, Mrs. Kennedy wore a Halston pillbox hat to her husband’s presidential inauguration, photographed in close-up by every news photographer in Washington. The pillbox was simple, almost severe, a small drum of fawn-colored fabric set toward the back of the head. Halston had asked Mrs. Kennedy to wear it forward; she pushed it back so it would not block her face in photographs. The world saw it backward, and Halston became a household name overnight.
By 1966, hats were declining as a daily accessory. Halston followed his customers into clothing. He launched a ready-to-wear line at Bergdorf, then in 1968 opened his own couture house, Halston Ltd., on Madison Avenue. He won Coty American Fashion Critics awards in 1971 and 1972. In 1973, the year of Versailles, he sold the business to the conglomerate Norton Simon Inc. for sixteen million dollars, agreeing to remain principal designer. The sale gave him the resources to expand into ready-to-wear, fragrance, and licensing. It also handed control of his name to a board of directors he did not sit on. That decision would matter ten years later.
Ultrasuede and the Working Woman
In the autumn of 1972, a year before Versailles, Halston introduced a shirt-dress. Six buttons down the front, point collar, long sleeves, a self-belt at the waist, falling to mid-calf. The cut was unremarkable. The fabric was not. The material was Ultrasuede, a synthetic non-woven microfiber developed in Japan by Toray Industries and patented in 1970 by Toray scientists Miyoshi Okamoto and Toyohiko Hikota. Ultrasuede looked and felt like fine suede leather. It was machine-washable. It did not crease, scuff, or stain. It cost a fraction of suede and had no animal product in it. Toray launched it internationally in New York and Paris in the early 1970s. Halston was one of the first major designers to put it into a signature garment.
The Ultrasuede shirt-dress retailed for around two hundred dollars in 1972, expensive by working-women’s standards but a tenth of the price of a couture day dress. Halston ran it in mushroom, camel, navy, and ivory. The dress was the working woman’s uniform of the second half of the decade. It went to a Madison Avenue advertising office, a Park Avenue legal practice, a museum board meeting, and a Manhattan dinner without changing. Liza Minnelli wore it. Lauren Bacall wore it. Babe Paley wore it. So did mid-level executives in San Francisco and Chicago whose names did not appear in the gossip columns. Halston produced the dress in dozens of colorways and tens of thousands of units through the 1970s, and it became the single most identifiable American women’s garment of the decade.
That was new. Through the 1950s, women’s clothing had been priced and constructed for occasions, with different garments for morning, afternoon, cocktail, and evening, each with its own rules. Halston collapsed the categories. The Ultrasuede shirt-dress was an all-day garment. The halter dress in jersey he introduced shortly after was an all-evening garment. The caftan covered weekend and resort. The cashmere twin set covered weekday formal. Halston’s wardrobe was four or five pieces a working woman could wear across her entire life, in fabrics that did not require a salon’s worth of maintenance.
Studio 54
Studio 54 opened on Tuesday, April 26, 1977, at 254 West 54th Street, in a former CBS television studio. The owners were Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, Brooklyn-born partners who had been running a less glamorous Queens nightclub called the Enchanted Garden. The publicist was Carmen D’Alessio, who had worked for Valentino and whose Rolodex included Halston, Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and Truman Capote. Five thousand invitations went out in advance. The opening-night crowd outside the club extended for blocks; Warren Beatty, Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Henry Winkler, and Frank Sinatra were not let in.
Halston, who had been close to Rubell from the planning stage, made Studio 54 his uptown salon. One week after the opening, on Monday, May 2, 1977, he hosted a birthday party there for Bianca Jagger, the Nicaraguan-born wife of Mick Jagger. The club was closed on Mondays; Rubell opened it for Halston. The party had perhaps a hundred and fifty guests. At some point during the night, a white horse from Claremont Stables on the Upper West Side was led onto the dance floor by a man wearing nothing but gold body paint. Jagger climbed onto the horse, and the photograph that resulted, taken by Rose Hartman, became one of the most reproduced images of the disco era. Jagger has since stated that she did not ride into the club on the horse, as is often reported, but mounted it after it was already inside. The correction has had no effect on the photograph’s circulation.
For roughly three years, Studio 54 was the dress circle of Halston’s career. He arrived every night in a black turtleneck and tailored trousers. His Halstonettes, the in-house models who included Pat Cleveland, Karen Bjornson, Alva Chinn, and Anjelica Huston, surrounded him at his banquette. His dresses, in cashmere, jersey, and Ultrasuede, were the dance-floor uniform of the room. He hosted Andy Warhol’s birthday there in August 1979. The club’s audience was the audience for Halston’s clothes, and the audience for Halston’s clothes was the audience the magazines wanted to photograph. The system closed on itself.
In December 1978, the IRS raided Studio 54 and found six hundred thousand dollars in cash hidden inside the walls. Rubell and Schrager were prosecuted for tax evasion and went to prison for thirteen months in early 1980. The club closed in February 1980 with a final party titled “The End of Modern-day Gomorrah.” Halston was there. So was Liza Minnelli, who sang “New York, New York.” The room Halston had used as his stage was gone.
The JCPenney Deal
In 1983, Halston signed a six-year licensing deal with JCPenney for a line called Halston III, reported in the trade press as worth roughly one billion dollars in expected revenue across the contract life. The line consisted of dresses, separates, accessories, fragrance, and cosmetics priced between twenty-four and two hundred dollars, designed for the mass-market American working woman who could not afford a Halston Ltd. dress at Bergdorf Goodman. Halston, by this point a famous and expensive designer who had been making clothes for the women on the inside of Studio 54 for six years, had decided the next stage of his career was the women on the outside.
The reaction from the high-end retailers was immediate. Bergdorf Goodman, which had carried Halston since the late 1960s and had been the first store to put his name in its hats twenty-five years earlier, dropped his couture line within weeks of the JCPenney announcement. Saks Fifth Avenue and Bonwit Teller followed. The retailers’ reasoning was straightforward and not unreasonable: a customer who could buy Halston at JCPenney for forty dollars would not pay six hundred dollars for the equivalent at Bergdorf. The high-low strategy that would later define every major luxury house in the 1990s and 2000s was not yet a thing American fashion knew how to execute. Halston had bet on it ten years too early.
The deal also handed control of his name to corporate management. Norton Simon Inc., which had owned the Halston brand since 1973, was itself acquired by Esmark Inc. in 1983. Esmark was acquired by Beatrice Foods in 1984. By 1984, Halston had been banned from designing under his own name by a board of directors he had never met. He spent the rest of his career making costumes for Liza Minnelli’s tours and for Martha Graham’s dance company, neither of which required his name in the credits. The Halston III line sold in declining volumes through JCPenney and was discontinued by the end of the decade. The Halston Ltd. high-end label had never recovered the Bergdorf relationship.
Halston was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. He died on March 26, 1990, of AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma, at the age of fifty-seven. The Halston name has passed through multiple corporate owners over the three decades since.
Halston was not just a designer. He was the moment American fashion stopped trying to be Paris and started selling itself to itself, and the cautionary parable of what happens when a couture house signs the mass-market deal it cannot survive. Quant kept her name. Halston signed his away in 1983 and never got it back. The Ultrasuede dress outlived him by decades. The label did not. American fashion built its first couture house and lost it inside fifteen years.