HALSTON

FASHION DESIGNER

In the 1970s, Halston put an end to the 1960s anti-establishment look of fringed leather and beads and raised the image of American fashion with a line of simple, elegant, well-bred clothes.

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, on April 23, 1932, Roy Halston Frowick was educated at Indiana University and the Art Institute of Chicago. He began his fashion career in Chicago, making hats for movie stars. In 1957 he moved to New York City, where he worked or the milliner Lilly Daché and at Bergdorf Goodman. He designed the pillbox hat that Jacqueline Kennedy wore to her husband's presidential inauguration in 1960. But women were giving up hats, and by 1966 Halston had designed his first clothes for Bergdorf.

In 1968 he founded his own company to make high fashion clothes and added a ready-to-wear division in 1972. He had great success with new fabrics, such as Ultrasuede, and he revived a classic look of tailored suits, comfortable casual clothes, and raditional evening gowns. In 1973 he sold his company to Norton Simon, but kept design control and continued to succeed with such new products as perfume and jewelry.

By the end of the 1970s Halston had become a glamorous celebrity who hobnobbed with the smart set known as the "glitterati” and stayed out all night at Studio 54 (see Steve Rubell, card 46). When he began to design cheaper clothes for J.C. Penney, Bergdorf dropped him, and his company became a casualty of the ad for conglomerates to buy and sell corporations. By the middle 1980s he had lost the right to use his own name in fashion design. He died of AIDS on March 26, 1990.

Next Card 21: KEITH HARING: Artist

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