If ’70s fashion designer Halston is a creation, a persona, an idea of a person (one with taste), one that eventually gets watered down and then wisps away under the thumb of mass marketing beyond its initial couture means and origins, “Halston,” the glorified SparksNotes posing as prestige mini-series of the rise and fall of the fashion icon created by Sharr White and executive produced by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan is similarly hollow to the mass-marketed garbage he peddled in the ‘80. Like the idea of the idea of a person, too opaque to be mystical, too schematic to be visceral, too broad to be remotely human, Netflix’s “Halston” series is superficial. At least when the designer’s clothes flopped, whether fitting ill on a model or structured unwisely, there was an impression of purpose and a clarity of intent. After five episodes, nothing in the series shimmers. Any attempt to rehabilitate or revive the mononymous fashion artist’s name via the passionless dramatic info dump about Halton’s highs and (frankly) mostly lows is left in tatters.
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Perhaps this is because, at its core, “Halston,” based on Steven Gaines’ biography “Simply Halston,” is only interested in the man, born Roy Halston (Ewan McGregor) in Des Moines, Iowa, insofar as how well he fits within an imagined necessary list of gay icons and artists who are of some import. The emotional nuances and details of his skillset are moot so long as the show is oriented around someone who is gay (check), created a persona (check) that was a way to escape some crippling outsiderness (check), whose singular identity changed whatever field they were in (check), all the while indulging in some sweet self-destruction (check). The events in “Halston,” which begin shortly after he’s designed a legendary pillbox hat for Jackie O, are random points on a personal timeline that don’t really add up to anything nor create much of a cohesive character. Murphy’s interest in queer characters seems to have boiled down to quota, no longer people, just blueprints and sketches. You could sub in any trouble queer person; that’s how vague and unspecific (and uncaring) this series is. There’s no “why” here. It’s like an outline of a tortured genius biopic, but make it gay.
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“Halston” cares little about the chic designer’s actual textiles or the creative process, those moments relegated primarily to montages that take no pleasure in embedding them into the character’s life. Even the creation of a perfume bottle says little about Halston as someone with a creative vision who puts in the work of creating and more about both the brief spritzes of a commercial marketing aesthetic and the designer’s temper tantrums. Puzzlingly, fashion is not really context but bizarrely siloed in the show’s universe: there’s almost only Halston and his designs, which have sprung up from thin air. No suggestion of how the social and political atmosphere informed the fashion at the time, exactly how he challenged those aesthetic ethoses, how he, too, was influenced by the changing cultural climate and gender politics of the time. The designs are just there, and the clothes just become what they become. A thesaurus worth of words akin to sexiness and sensuousness is used to describe what Halston wants in his designs, but neither the camera nor the storytelling ever really captures and conveys that. There is no thought into the movement or fall or cut of a piece of fabric (though a character talks about how much that matters to him), much less how that decision is made (only a chorus of “that doesn’t look right” and “that’s wrong,” etc.). Momentarily, in the pilot, there’s a hint at an understanding of what other women are wearing and how that might imply a landscape of women’s fashion he was ready to disrupt, but this lasts only seconds, the show preferring an insular and decontextualized approach. And paradoxically, he is defined by his envy of other designers (like Balenciaga and Calvin Klein) and yet defined by nothing, no particular idea anchoring his essence or power. Unlike the best of film and fashion like Bertrand Bonello’s “Saint Laurent” or the nonfiction film “McQueen,” whose ideas about fashion and fashion iconography extend to their cinematic form, it has no perspective or insight about the work or the person, besides the assumption of his greatness.
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No, the show is only intrigued by the salacious; Halston’s temper tantrums, stubbornness, addiction, and cruelty, and the like. Yet, the show refuses to contextualize any of these actions into a more detailed character. As he tears through his friends, like fashion illustrator Joe Eula (David Pittu) and lovers like Victor Hugo (Gian Franco Rodriguez), he’s at risk of being all alone. But the show doesn’t really give us a reason why they— never mind an audience member— should care about him or his looming abandonment in the first place. Curiously, it’s like the opposite of a hagiography; while it would be hard-pressed to say that “Halston” has any understanding of spectacle, one could argue that its spectacle is in watching Halston burn bridges. But this, too, is boring, barely watchable in the drabbest of ways, with nothing to justify those actions dramatically or emotionally. McGregor is fine, every line reeking of acid, even the less tempestuous things poisoned with venom and paralyzed by a one-note performance. The real Halston’s voice was velvet tugged over razor teeth; McGregor’s is closer to velvet, violently distressed, unconvincing, and more like vocal char. HIs fury and substance abuse is given ample time, from constant coke-snorting to scene after scene of the man simply refusing to cooperate; but as none of this is even half-heartedly put in relation to some creative genius, it quickly becomes a chore to watch, especially given the unidimensionality of his character. Halston was a messy bitch, but “Halston” is merely a bore.
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Much of this is to blame on the writing, with several of the episodes penned by creator White and producers Brennan and Murphy; there’s an overreliance on telling the audience ostensibly why one should care about any of these people in a rather theatrical way (White is a playwright). Yet, it always hedges on showing us why any of these people deserve attention. There’s no gradation of motivation or action; everything is literally spelled out in dialogue. The subtlety of a nasty look turns into a short paragraph about inventing oneself, even as the show goes to great pains to show the invention of Halston while in the bathroom, devoid of any organic creation. And when the show does try to convince the audience why we should be interested in these people, then it folds in on itself.
This is most evident when “Halston” tries to explore the relationship between him and Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez), and it’s Liza that is perhaps most emblematic of the show’s emptiness. Rodriguez, who is a perfectly talented singer and dancer, is not doing an impression of the real Liza. But she’s not doing an actual interpretation or embodiment of a character Liza either. She’s seen singing “Liza with a Z,” performing at Versailles, dancing on the television screen. There’s no spark of a muse nor textural tenderness of deep interpersonal understanding. There’s just the pixie cut and some of the outfits, so ephemeral it disappears as you watch it, iconography disassembled by an algorithm assuming gay audience loyalty to the icon, an uncanny performance resembling and feeling like nothing.
A couple of moments in the series gesture towards a more compelling show with an actual point of view, but they are fleeting. After Halston has made someone of a Faustian licensing pact with business partner David Mahoney (Bill Pullman), he’s seen in commercial after commercial, an armada of Halston clones on the screen hocking random products ancillary to his original garments. And when he decides to finally make a deal with a large chain department store, he remarks, “JC Penney is part of the American fabric. And I’m part of the American fabric.” But “Halston,” in the sum of its five episodes, has no point of view about America, about how it uses fashion (beyond a cliche about costumes), about the invention of identities other than we do invent them, or about the bodies that inhabit those costumes.
Halston’s sexual proclivity towards Black and Latinx men goes uncommented upon, and his presence at the Battles at Versailles fashion show in 1973 makes no effort to interrogate what his role in American fashion actually is, much less the people that makeup (or are excluded from) his vision of America. Halston’s life might be a story of an artist averse to any form of compromise and self-awareness, such that he sold his selfhood, a story of how commerce won over art, how that can happen in the United States on the way to one’s dream (articulated through allegedly gorgeous garments), the way that capitalism can make your identity thin out like last season’s clothes. And you can tell that Murphy, in his continually expanding oeuvre, that his interest in these concepts is both broadening but also becoming, like Halston’s JC Penney products, cookie-cutter, mass-produced, steadily losing any sense of identity. “Halson,” whose prestige is at best threadbare, shouldn’t have made it out of the workroom. [D]
“Halston” is available now on Netflix.