Halston

Born:-04/23/1932
Died:-03/26/1990

Fashion designer known especially for his hats, he designed the pillbox hat that Jacqueline Kennedy wore to her husband's presidential inauguration.

He was the American designer of a decade, a legend in his own time, in his own mind, and, in the Seventies, in reality. Starting as an assistant hat designer at Bergdorf Goodman, Halston launched his own ready-to-wear collection at Bergdoff in 1966. Two years later, he started his own company and soon became a star. He reintroduced the twinset, made cashmere chic again, reinvented the caftan and created a sensation with a new form of fake suede. He dressed everyone from hip New Yorkers to Katharine Graham and Betty Ford.

In 1973, while he was at his peak, Halston sold his company to Norton Simon for millions of dollars worth of stock. But he sold out again in 1983, doing a collection for J.C.Penney. With that - and the fact that he was so solidly identified with the Seventies - the Halston mystique evaporated. Bergdorf Goodman dropped him. He even lost the right to use his name; he'd sold it along with his business. In the end he would almost be best remembered as a creature of the night at Studio 54, dressed all in black and surrounded by clouds of Halstonettes. He died in 1990 from AIDS.

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