Costume Designer Jeriana San Juan Gives a Lesson on Design in ‘Halston’
For the new Netflix limited series, the costume designer helps turn Ewan McGregor into the legendary fashion mogul—complete with some sewing lessons.
Halston revolutionized fashion in the late ‘60s and throughout the ‘70s, recognized for his Batik dyed caftans, use of Ultrasuede, halter dresses, and nearly seamless designs (he liked to sew with as few seams as possible). Costume designer Jeriana San Juan was tasked with recreating a number of his sartorial innovations in the new Ryan Murphy show Halston, out today on Netflix.
The five-part limited series starring Ewan McGregor centers on the American designer’s journey from a milliner at Bergdorf Goodman to a sartorial icon known for partying at Studio 54 and keeping the company of actress Liza Minelli (Krysta Rodriguez), jewelry designer Elsa Peretti (Rebecca Dayan), and other glittering fixtures of New York’s nightlife of the era. The designer’s life of glamour and excess was eventually dampened in the 1980s when he was ousted from his company and then had an untimely AIDS-related passing at age 57. Spanning from the 1950s to 1990s, San Juan reflected the evolution of the designer through the show’s costumes—both with Halston’s personal style and the fashion he created.
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“When I met with Daniel Minahan, the director, in our first meeting for the project, I just sat down and gushed about Halston for about an hour straight until he finally got a word in,” San Juan tells L’OFFICIEL. She pored over images of Halston’s work from the Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily archives, digging through to his earliest, sometimes little-documented work. “I really wanted to study him as a designer and intimately understand his point of view,” she says.
This was essential for scenes like the reimagining of Halston’s tie-dye runway collection from the late ‘60s. San Juan was able to source two original caftans from that period of Halston’s work to use on the show, but trying to find them was no easy feat. “The unfortunate factor of his legacy is that his entire archive was disassembled when he left Halston,” the costume designer says. To acquire the rare finds, she reached out to private collectors, vintage, vendors, and former Halstonettes, like Chris Royer, who was gifted clothes from the designer. The rest, she and her team constructed. This includes a dress that the audience sees McGregor’s Halston create on the show, which San Juan wanted to “highlight all of the magic and iconic elements of his work.” She decided to go with a Batik dyed one-seam caftan.
“I wanted to make something we could see turn on the bias on camera in order to educate an audience about what the bias is,” the designer says. “And for the real fashion crowd, I wanted for them to see the caftan and really understand it was a tribute to that very iconic shape and silhouette.”
To help McGregor embody the mind and manner of the designer, San Juan walked him through the construction of the piece and taught him what the bias is (it’s when fabric is cut on the diagonal, giving it more stretch and ability to drape on the body). “Walking it through with Ewan was amazing because he's such a quick study,” she says. “He's incredible.”
She also dressed McGregor in a palette and fabrics that evolve throughout the series, indicating the different periods of his career. The character is seen in grey in softer moments, for example, but as more turmoil is brought into his life, red becomes a prominent color. The color also connects to Halston’s designs during that time, further underscoring that arch in his life.
Other moments reinterpreted in the series include the legendary 1973 Battle of Versailles fashion show, the designer’s nights out at Studio 54, and even more casual scenes shared with Halston’s fashionable friends. “There was a lot of invention in those moments,” San Juan says of the latter. “I tried to show a fully realized human and what they would have worn in a more personal moment that wasn’t photographed. Halston dressed his muses and the women he surrounded himself with. Whether it was [Anjelica] Huston or Minnelli, they always wore Halston because they were ambassadors to his brand, so those were great opportunities for me to pay homage to some of his other pieces that weren’t able to walk the runway.”
Beyond simply recreating Halston’s clothes, it was important to San Juan to honor the designer by showing how his work set itself apart from the other styles of the time. “My love of fashion extends far beyond Halston and so I wanted to paint the canvas completely not only with what Halston's entourage would look like, but also what they would look like in contrast to rest of the fashion world that surrounds them,” San Juan explains. “There were a lot of moments where I really studied textile designs of each particular period that we walked through, because Halston often worked with bright, bold, solid colors. I wanted to highlight that artistically against the many patterns and many other colors that were happening, so his always popped in his environment.”
