Roy Halston Frowick was born in 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa, and raised between Iowa and Illinois. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, opened a millinery shop in Chicago in 1957, and moved to New York in 1958 to work at Bergdorf Goodman's millinery department, which he soon headed.

The Pillbox

In January 1961 Jacqueline Kennedy wore a beige wool pillbox hat to her husband's presidential inauguration. It had been designed by Halston. The hat appeared in every subsequent photograph and was, for the remainder of Kennedy's First Ladyship, her signature silhouette. It was Halston's commercial moment.

The House

He opened his own couture house, on East 68th Street, in 1968. His signature aesthetic — fluid, minimalist, bias-cut, in monochromatic blocks of beige, black, or red — was, at its moment, the definitive New York luxury silhouette. His wardrobe was worn by Liza Minnelli (his closest friend and most frequent muse), Bianca Jagger (whose 1977 Studio 54 birthday arrived on a white horse in a Halston dress), Elizabeth Taylor, Anjelica Huston, and most of the Upper East Side.

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I do what I think looks good on the woman who is going to wear it. And then I get it to the price she can afford. — Halston

Studio 54

Halston was, along with Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, and Truman Capote, one of the principal habitués of Studio 54 during its 1977–80 peak. His association with the club was, at the time, commercially useful. In retrospect, the nightly presence, the cocaine, and the attrition of design hours would be cited as contributing to his creative decline.

The Licensing Disaster

In 1983 Halston signed a USD-one-billion licensing deal with JC Penney — at that date, the largest such deal any designer had ever signed. Bergdorf Goodman dropped his couture line within the week, on the grounds that a couturier could not simultaneously sell at JC Penney. The deal, commercially the largest fashion deal of the 1980s, destroyed his reputation in luxury retail. He lost control of his own name to Esmark, a conglomerate, that same year.

Halston died of AIDS-related Kaposi's sarcoma in San Francisco in 1990, at 57. The 2021 Netflix series Halston, with Ewan McGregor in the title role, reinstated him, in the general public imagination, at the cost of some biographical compression.