Kennedy wrote to her personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman to say that while she was First Lady she intended to name the store her official clothier. Jacqueline Kennedy was destined to have a greater influence on the fashion world than any other woman in American history-and she would have a Halston hat on her head while doing so. ![]() He was probably the greatest hatmaker in the world, an absolute magician with his hands.”īut it took Jacqueline Kennedy and the pillbox hat to make him into an international star. Once, he made twelve snoods in the twinkling of an eye. “I’d say to him, ‘I had a dream about a hat last night,’ ” said Vreeland, “and I’d go about describing it, and then, by God, he’d give it to me line for line. “Halston learned a great deal from Charles James about designing and the world of style and society,” said Lilly Daché, “and probably other things too.”īy the early sixties, after Halston left Daché to work at Bergdorf Goodman, he was blessed with the admiration of perhaps the single most powerful press person in the fashion world, Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. When he was sober and functioning, however, he was enormous fun, knowledgeable and unpredictable. James’s favorite flowers were orchids orchids would become not only Halston’s favorite flower but his trademark bloom.īy the time the two men became friends in New York, James was living in a rented studio apartment in the Chelsea Hotel with a beagle he kept on a leash tied to the doorknob, and if he was drunk or stoned, he might answer the door in his underwear. James’s favorite champagne was Moët & Chandon it became Halston’s favorite. For a long period they had dinner two or three nights a week, and James became a confidant and mentor to the young milliner. He was, most of all, an artiste, and Halston was enthralled by him. Balenciaga called him “the greatest couturier in the world,” and he was one of the few designers to elevate fashion into fine art. He would spend several months and $20,000 just to get the sleeve on a dress to hang the way he wanted it to. James viewed his dresses in the same way a great painter or sculptor would look upon his work. Perhaps his single most famous dress was called “the Four-Leaf Clover,” with four distinct “petals,” designed for Austine Hearst in 1953. There was a fantastical quality to his visions, and in his entire career he produced only two hundred designs. James had gone on to become one of the great masters of the ball gown. Born in England, he had been sent to America by his family to become a businessman, but instead he began a fashion career in Chicago as a milliner-just like Halston. James was a small man with thinning hair that he dyed shoe-polish black, two thin slashes of dyed eyebrows, and the features of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He also became a profound- and prophetic-influence on the young designer. James introduced Halston to many important social and business contacts. James was then fifty and, for Halston, the Leonardo da Vinci of dressmaking. ![]() He had been invited to work for the well-known milliner Lilly Daché, but from the moment he arrived in Manhattan the person he sought out was the designer Charles James. He was twenty-six, with a small reputation he had earned in Chicago as a hat designer in his older lover’s hairstyling salon. The man who called himself simply Halston was as complicated and contradictory as the forces that shaped him. Before he died of AIDS in March 1990, he had lost control of his business and fallen from the social heights, but he remained almost mythic. For two decades he was also the king of New York nightlife, a dramatic and compelling figure always dressed in black, his posture regally erect, his piercing green eyes hidden by mirrored sunglasses. Born Roy Halston Frowick in Des Moines, Iowa, he became an international legend. Perhaps the greatest American fashion designer who ever drew a breath, Halston dressed the best of them. ![]() ‘You’re only as good as the people you dress.” That was Halston’s favorite truism.
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