I never thought much one way or another about the designer Halston, until I started researching him for a mystery novel. I’d remembered Halston’s dresses as tubes hanging on 28AA women with glossy lipstick who partied at Studio 54 in the late 1970s. Then I learned that those simple tubes were masterpieces of Halston’s “spiral cut,” in which he took an extra wide length of fabric — so wide he first used upholstery fabric, then commissioned his own fabric runs in Italy — and fashioned them meticulously to hang on the bias with a long, spiral seam. In the late 1960s, he even worked with legendary couturier Charles James and hung his fabric diagonally to relax before cutting it, just as Vionnet did.

Halston’s monastic simplicity? Genius and craft are what made those dresses look so effortless. The best light chypres of the 1970s stir the same magic for me…

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