Take a Depeche Mode song and slow it down, grab a story set in the roaring seventies and the violent eighties, find a fashion designer who stands out with self-centered comments and excessive drug use - and that's it! Imitation of what must have been a real artist's life.
Johanna Dürrholz
Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET
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It is the designer Halston who receives this honor and who is only described as a “fashion icon” overseas. He was one of the first American fashion designers to achieve something in Europe, and that's why people over there are rightly proud of him and his visions. On the other hand, not only the Halston brand, whose name the designer himself was no longer allowed to determine at the end of his life, has long been forgotten, in Europe the fashion designer himself is at best considered a cult figure.
So now Ryan Murphy has taken on the story, next to Shonda Rhimes another heavyweight producer who was exclusively signed by Netflix. He is the creator of insane series such as “Glee” or “Pose” and has long been considered a guarantee of good entertainment. He has recently gambled away this guarantee with films such as "The Prom". And he actually has a similar story to the designer Halston: In the USA he is a superstar, in Europe his name is hardly known.
In any case, there are incredibly beautiful scenes in “Halston”, for example when the designer, played by Ewan McGregor (yes, the Star Wars dude) meets his future best friend Liza Minnelli, who smiles after a verbal exchange and says: “ I like him ”. Or when he dresses Minnelli for the first time: In a few simple steps, a piece of red fabric can be turned into an elegant evening dress that makes Minnelli appear like a new woman. Incidentally, McGregor actually made the dress at that moment: he learned how to properly cut textiles for the shoot.
One advantage of the mini-series over the feature film is that résumés can be shown in more detail, and figures and characters develop. But this is exactly what “Halston” misses, despite the length: Ewan McGregor smokes like a world champion, has acquired the peculiar accent of Halston, who originally came from Indiana, and is wonderfully arrogant - but it stays that way. A scratch on the eccentric surface of an artist addicted to cocaine, whose motives and artistic motivation are never revealed.