12/13/2023 0 Comments Halston ewan mcgregorVera Farmiga plays Halston’s nose (a bit of creative license, as the real perfumer was a tweedy Frenchman), asking him to bring in three items that carry sensorial significance. In the third episode of “Halston,” for instance, the perfume becomes a sort of heavy-handed metaphor for Halston’s inner life and repressed memories. The dramatic plot points are all there, but the soul of Halston’s work-his actual creations, and how they shaped the lives of the women who lived in them-comes through only as a faint note. Instead of presenting a shambling, complex tangle of ambition and artistry, the five episodes play out like a live-action Wikipedia article peppered with faux-campy contrivances. “Halston,” directed by Daniel Minahan, starring Ewan McGregor in the titular role, and with Ryan Murphy as an executive producer, feels as slick and indulgent as Halston’s sprawling Olympic Tower office-a cocaine-fuelled space that featured mirrored walls and tables, a sea of plush cherry-red carpeting, and a reputed forty thousand dollars per year in decorative orchids-but it does not feel half as uncanny or daring as the actual world Halston created. But the danger of a seductive story is that it is easy to become seduced while telling it. He flew too high-his final headquarters looked out over the spire of a tall cathedral in Manhattan-had too much fun, and then the confetti ran out. At the height of his fame, Halston oozed courtly glamour out of his pores (which he tinted orange with heavy bronzer) and cut a striking figure in tight black turtlenecks and dark sunglasses, a cigarette perpetually dangling between his fingers. The life of Halston-who was born Roy Halston Frowick, in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1932-should make for potent television: a Midwestern, gay fashion obsessive comes to the big city, drops his first name, changes his aesthetic, dominates Bergdorf Goodman and Studio 54, sells his name, loses everything, and dies too young. As it turns out, the synthetic, exasperating reformulation was a perfect match for watching the series. Still, I bought a bottle recently, because I knew that a new Netflix miniseries about Halston (called, simply, “Halston,”) was coming, and I wanted to turn my viewing experience into a kind of Smell-O-Vision. It evaporates quickly and smells a little like soap. It cannot clear elevators or persist through a night of heavy dancing. If the city was crumbling around you, why not smell like death and sex, entropy and excess? The new formula does not smell like these things. The seventies were an unbridled and messy time, when loucheness was a life style born of postwar nihilism and economic decline. The scent, created by the legendary French parfumier Bernard Chant, was tangy, feral, and almost too naughty to wear to work, but this mildly transgressive quality was a big part of the appeal. That perfume-which cost sixty dollars an ounce back then, roughly equivalent to three hundred dollars today-came in an exquisite glass teardrop bottle designed by the Tiffany’s jewelry designer and longtime Halston collaborator Elsa Peretti. But both the plastic-necked bottle and the caramel-colored juice within it are only echoes of Halston’s original 1975 blockbuster fragrance. The Halston comes in a beige box, with the late designer’s name on it in his signature all-caps, sans-serif font, and costs about thirty dollars. If you want to buy a bottle of Halston perfume, go to your local CVS and check one of those locked plexiglass fragrance cabinets that house ancient boxes of Liz Claiborne and Jovan Musk.
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