That would have been sort of embarrassing. “Before Halston," Minahan notes, "people didn't want to be seen at a party wearing the same dress. The designer formed what Minahan calls a “chosen family” that spanned everyone from high society dame Babe Paley to downtown Warhol superstar Pat Ast, all united by their affection for his designs. "They documented everything they did,” whether it was a night out at Studio 54 or a society gala. “It feels like, in this world of influencers, here are these people that really were the first to do it," says director and executive producer Daniel Minahan. But Netflix’s new Ryan Murphy-helmed limited series Halston, based on Gaines’s book, might be what introduces him to a younger generation, who will see some surprising parallels between his career and the standard 2021 roundelay of self-promotion, influencing, and brand-building. Halston’s story has spawned biographies (Steven Gaines’s Simply Halston: The Untold Story), a self-titled documentary, and many a museum retrospective. He didn't vertically climb the ranks of society so much as he horizontally insulated himself with people, including the model coterie that André Leon Talley christened “the Halstonettes.” It was in Manhattan that he reinvented himself as a fashion phenom and Studio 54 fixture, surrounded by a rotating Lazy Susan of beautiful people, speaking in a clipped, affected accent that became his signature. When he left his childhood home in Indiana, far from the mythical coasts, he dropped two of his names like last season's castoffs, adopted a chic mononym, and headed straight for more densely populated pastures: first Chicago, then New York City. Roy Halston Frowick didn’t take well to being alone. Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
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