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The Obligation to Beauty

palladiummag.com · 2,945 words · saved by 1 readers

In 1990, Roy Halston Frowick, professionally known simply as Halston, lay dying in a San Francisco hospital. The designer who made Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat iconic, who dressed Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, and who transformed American fashion in the 1970s, was being destroyed by AIDS complications. “I’m just a dressmaker,” he said before he died. “That’s what I do.” Not “I was” a dressmaker. Not reflections on celebrity or Studio 54 or the empire he’d lost. Calvin Klein would later call him one of the greatest American fashion designers who ever lived. Between 1981 and 1996, AIDS killed an estimated 100,000 gay men in New York City alone. Fashion designers, art directors, gallery owners, theater producers, choreographers; an entire generation whose lives were their art disappeared within fifteen years. Not just the famous names like Halston, Perry Ellis, and Willi Smith, but showroom assistants, stylists, photographers, creative directors, and window dressers. Chester Weinber

Hulki Okan Tabak/Dancers on a theater stage in Istanbul, Turkey In 1990, Roy Halston Frowick, professionally known simply as Halston, lay dying in a San Francisco hospital. The designer who made Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat iconic, who dressed Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, and who transformed American fashion in the 1970s, was being destroyed by AIDS complications. “I’m just a dressmaker,” he said before he died. “That’s what I do.” Not “I was” a dressmaker. Not reflections on celebrity or Studio 54 or the empire he’d lost. Calvin Klein would later call him one of the greatest American f

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