Halston for today! Specifically, Netflix’s upcoming limited series based on the life of the iconic American designer. The trailer for Halston is everything that the name implies: Sex! Studio 54! Cigarettes! Cocaine! Liza!
“I have a vision,” Ewan McGregor’s Halston says over the pulsing beat of Depeche Mode’s “All I Ever Wanted.” “I’m gonna change the face of American fashion.”
Executive produced by Ryan Murphy—yes, him again—the series follows the designer as he builds a global brand around his own larger than life identity, and then has to fight a hostile takeover to retain control of his own name. Meanwhile, the lavish lifestyle that makes him an object of fascination begins to spin out of control. “The one thing you don’t know how to do,” Krysta Rodriguez’s Liza Minnelli tells Halston has he hoovers up line after line of blow, “is stop.”
According to the show’s executive producer and director Daniel Minahan, the age of Instagram is the perfect time to revisit Halston’s life. “Both his failures and successes really taught people how to brand and market themselves,” he explains. “I feel like the world has finally caught up with his story. We live in a time that’s obsessed with identity, and this is the story of a man who reinvented himself time and again and, in a way, became the first influencer.”
And then there are the clothes. Costume designer Jeriana San Juan “went to the ends of the earth” in her research, sourcing original pieces and recreating many of the show’s iconic looks from scratch. And it shows. “‘Halston’ became synonymous with ‘ease’ and ‘effortlessly sexy’ and ‘effortlessly strong,’” she explains. “But if you look at the architecture and practical building of all those pieces, they’re actually quite complicated. Halston’s work is very much like sculpture.”
So far, Murphy’s Netflix offerings have been lackluster, despite impressive budgets and mega-watt casts. But if this first look is any indication, at the very least Halston is going to be a wild romp through the glamour and excess of 1970s fashion!
