The Great Fashion Designers (28 page)

At Bergdorf Goodman, Halston garnered a following of elegant society women, Broadway actresses, Hollywood stars and influential fashion editors who were to prove ready clients for his ready-to-wear clothing collection when, reluctantly, Bergdorf launched it for him in 1966. Both hats and haute couture were becoming less and less fashionable as the decade passed. Claire McCardell had led the way in marrying original design to mass production techniques. Halston did not aim to reach quite so wide a customer base, but he understood that a combination of luxury fabrics with cuts simple enough for mass manufacture would be attractive to the kind of women used to couture and now beginning to buy the European boutique collections. Bergdorf Goodman gave him access to the Delman shoe salon to design a complementary range of shoes and a boutique for the collection on the second floor. The first collection, shown with music on dancing young models, consisted of eighteen interchangeable pieces. The presentation aroused media excitement, but sales were slow, and eighteen months later, Halston left Bergdorf's, setting up his own couture label three months later with modest backing from Mrs Estelle Marsh Watlington of Texas.

By now Halston was part of a glittering circle of clients and creative friends, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Elsa Peretti, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Diana Vreeland, Martha Graham, Babe Paley, Barbara Walters, Lauren Bacall, Bianca Jagger, Anjelica Huston and Liza Minnelli. In 1972,
Newsweek
magazine designated him ‘surely the premier fashion designer of all America'. The simplicity that was his trademark was perceived as cleanlimbed, healthy and all-American in contrast to the over-decorated, decadent ethnic peasant looks that were being created by all the European designers. Halston hated fussiness and, in 1973, when invited to participate in a fashion show at Versailles where American designers showcased their work alongside top French designers, he stunned the fashion world by the strict purity of his dresses.

The Halston look spoke of understated wealth: cashmere sweaters, silk shirtwaist dresses, simple elegant wool pants. ‘I didn't want to make clothes for kids,' he said. ‘I wanted feminine clothes for women between 22 and 55.' Even his evening wear derived its glamour and sex appeal from the fabrics rather than any cleverness of cut. His colour palette was ivory, black, and red, but he understood the principle of accent and emphasis, using fuchsia, electric blue and deep burgundy. His best known garment was the Ultrasuede shirtwaist dress he introduced in 1972. It became a staple of his collections, re-run in many colours, and throughout the decade was one of the most popular dresses in America. Its success stemmed from its plainness and the fact that it did not wrinkle or crease and was machine washable. Halston became the Ultrasuede king, signing licensing agreements for
a range of products in Ultrasuede, including handbags, shoes, boots, belts and bed spreads.

Although Halston showed his clothes on stick-thin models before it was fashionable among designers to do so, he boasted of dressing Miss Average America. In 1978 he told Bernadine Morris of
The New York Times
, ‘You have to have something for the woman who is overweight—a loose tunic and pants is good because it elongates the body. You have to have something for the woman with hips—the princess line works for her. Caftans are fine for the woman whose figure isn't perfect.' That was the year he moved into the Olympic Tower skyscraper next door to St Patrick's cathedral and covered all the walls—including the washrooms—in mirror glass. He could sit at his red lacquer desk and look down on a Manhattan skyline multiply reflected.

In the early 1970s Halston's lover was a Colombian window dresser named Victor Hugo. Through Hugo Halston met Andy Warhol, who was to become a close friend. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he enthusiastically embraced the celebrity lifestyle and was frequently featured in the gossip columns often as a walker for beautiful, sometimes troubled, women. He was one of the faces of the infamous New York nightclub Studio 54. One of the most famous evenings in the degenerate history of the club was Halston's birthday party for Bianca Jagger in 1977. During this period, he was also seen partying with his friend Liza Minnelli at the gay holiday resort Fire Island. Patricia Mears reports that he took full advantage of the drugs and casual sex that were available at the nightclubs he frequented. Halston had been part of the pretty wild gay party scene since he moved to Chicago in the 1950s. When disco emerged in the 1970s he frequented the hottest clubs, socialised with celebrities, embraced the most popular drugs, and designed clothes that the celebrities wore to ‘make the scene'. His halter-neck dress of 1974 became a dance-floor staple as did his trademark strapless dresses, the one-shouldered sheaths and the asymmetrical necklines. All of his designs were simple and unconstructed, usually in solid colours and luxury fabrics. His narrow, elongated silhouettes skimmed over the body and flattered young and old figures alike. Halston's signature sunglasses, worn both day and night, completed the look.

In 1973 Norton Simon purchased all of Halston's companies, his trademark, and his exclusive design services for approximately $12 million. In 1975 menswear and perfume were added to the empire. The perfume was known simply as Halston and came in a bean-shaped bottle designed by Elsa Peretti. In 1977 Halston was invited to redesign the uniforms and aircraft interiors and airport spaces for Braniff Airlines. His brief was to create a look that conveyed the urbane sophistication of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was deemed at that stage in his career to be the designer who best understood a well-bred look. However, his partnership with Norton Simon Industries did not bring the riches Halston had hoped it would. Refusing to allow his name to be put on anything he did not design himself, he found it difficult to meet the level of productivity expected of him. His signature was seen on everything from spectacles to the uniforms worn by Avis car-rental employees, but he increasingly felt under pressure to produce even more.

In 1982, amid proliferating licences, Norton Simon Industries asked Halston to design a range for the down-market store group, JC Penney. He agreed, but it was seen as a step too far down the market and Bergdorf's and Martha's dropped his collections and formerly faithful friends and clients defected to other designers. Although the Halston III collection for JC Penney was successful, Halston's relationships with his bosses and colleagues deteriorated until finally, in 1984, he was locked out of his offices after throwing yet another ferocious temper tantrum. He was then fired, losing the rights to his own name. In 1988, after he was diagnosed with Aids, he sold his New York town house and moved to San Francisco, where he died in 1990. Of his glittering entourage, only Minnelli stayed true till the end. There have been three attempts to revive the label, the latest in 2008 by the president of Jimmy Choo, Tamara Mellon, and the movie mogul, Harvey Weinstein. They hired Marco Zanini, who had been head of couture at Versace for ten years, to design it. Reviews were mixed but the clothes, some of which went on sale online immediately, sold out. In 2009, Marios Schwab took over as desinger.

Further reading: Halston
(2001), edited by Steven Bluttal with essays by Patricia Mears.

In 1970 Kenzo Takada was the first Japanese fashion designer to show his work in Paris. He was joined very quickly on the catwalks of fashion's capital by his compatriots, Issey Miyake and Kansai Yamamoto. They were three very different designers, and they were all well received. Initially, however, Kenzo, with his bright and cheerful, intensely youthful clothes, was the great success. The world of haute couture had only recently adjusted to the youthquake that was changing the world and shifting its spending power. The chasm that had existed between the couturiers and the manufacturers of ready-to-wear for the masses was narrowing. As London, Milan and New York began to challenge the pre-eminence of Paris as arbiter and producer of fashion, the couture houses, led by Cardin and Saint Laurent, were creating boutique lines, less expensive versions of their couture, and young designers such as Sonia Rykiel, Emmanuelle Khanh and Karl Lagerfeld at Chloé launched high-fashion lines that were firmly targeted at the ready-to-wear market.

In 1973 the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne united with Didier Grumbach's Createurs et Industriels to form the Federation Française de la Couture, du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers and des Createurs de Mode. This umbrella organisation established the Chambre Syndicale du Pret-a-Porter des Couturiers et des Createurs de Mode as a separate and parallel organisation to the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. Significantly, Kenzo was a member from the start, regarded then and always as a star of French fashion.

When Kenzo had launched his label three years earlier, the hedonistic 1960s were segueing into the more idealistic 1970s, when altruism and a global perspective would dominate youth culture. In the aftermath of 1968 and the Paris riots (which Kenzo witnessed) it was a time of making love, not war, of turning on, tuning in and dropping out. Some experimented with collective living, others took to the hippy trail to discover new, simpler cultures and hoped to find enlightenment there or at least some kind of spiritual experience. Kenzo's innate eclecticism, his sensuous appreciation of print and pattern, his historicism and understanding of the drama of mass and volume, lush layers piled on in sizzling contrast—all expressed the joy in colour and natural beauty of the zeitgeist and captured the attention of the world's press from his first showing.

It is arguable that history has already done Kenzo Takada an injustice. In the early 1970s his were the shows that attracted the hysterical crowds, his the name that defined youthful fashion. His innovations were hugely influential: he literally put the flowers into flower power and was part of a group which thoroughly democratised and rejuvenated high fashion. But he was eclipsed by the Japanese designers who came later and who did not integrate into the French system in the same way. Unlike Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto, Kenzo always appointed French managers while recruiting Japanese creatives. But he was probably the hottest designer of the early 1970s.

The fifth of seven children, Kenzo Takada was born in the village of Himeji, in the shadow of a great castle. His elderly father ran a teahouse, and Kenzo grew up surrounded by the geishas who worked there. He has described his father as ‘upright, taciturn, rigid'. His mother, he said, ‘was active, attentive, courageous.' He did not enjoy the games the
boys at school played and was usually to be found studying his sister's fashion magazines and using the free patterns in them to make clothes. He made dolls too, and dressed them. ‘This,' he told Ginette Sainderichin, ‘is how I edged my way into fashion and how, in my dreams, I sewed dresses for the round-eyed daughters of the far-off West.'

He dropped out of Kobe University in 1958 to join the Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo, which had just started accepting male applicants. He worked his way through college, winning prizes, including the coveted So-En award, and press attention. The lecturer who taught him draping, an alien technique to Japan where clothes were conceived on the flat, was Chie Koike, a graduate of L'Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. She became Kenzo's mentor and encouraged him to think of further study in Paris. His first job on graduation was with Mikura, a designer of ready-to-wear; he later moved to Sanai, which specialised in fast fashion for the young. That was an important experience as he learned to produce forty models a month while keeping his vision fresh. In 1964 he used a windfall 350,000 yen to travel, with a classmate and friend, Hiromisu Matsuda, by sea to Europe. It was the proverbial slow boat. They visited Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Colombo, Djibouti and Alexandria on the way to Marseilles. They diverted to see Milan, Venice, Rome, Florence, Munich, Madrid and London before settling in Paris in spring 1965. (This was only the beginning of a lifetime's travel, a lifetime's passion for new places and cultures.)

When Kenzo first arrived in Paris he spoke no French. Having no work and little money, except what his mother could afford to send him, he wandered the streets, observing, learning, studying shop windows and watching the people. Eventually he was offered a job at Pisanti and then moved on to Relations Textiles, where he specialised in knitting techniques. Of all the Japanese designers working in the West, Kenzo was the most assimilated, a process which began as soon as he began to try to find work. ‘For the first four or five years in Paris,' he wrote in 1985:

I watched and observed what Parisian chic and elegance mean. Whether it is haute couture or prêt-à-porter, French clothes are well fitted to the body. Well cut, fitted and finished impeccably, and they have curves. That is Parisian chic and elegance. Such clothes-making has its own rules for its shapes, fabric selections, colour combinations, and it seemed to me there are rules even for the way you wear these clothes. Those are all confined within a stubborn frame of mind. That was suffocating for me.