Harvey’s Halston: Strong In The Front, Less At The Back

The most eagerly awaited fashion debut this season was the first collection by designer Marco Zanini at Halston; the famed fashion house bought last year by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and friends. All the great and the good and the arrogant and affable of fashion media were present for this show Monday lunchtime in Larry Gagosian’s famed Chelsea gallery. But though the turn out was impressive, the results on the runway underwhelmed.

Weinstein showed up with Liza Minnelli, while his fellow investor Tamara Mellon, the driving force behind shoe phenomena Jimmy Choo, appeared with her beau Christian Slater. But lots of paparazzi wattage, was followed by precious little flourish from the backstage.

Zanini, whose impressive resume includes stints at Versace, Dolce & Gabbana and Lawrence Steele, is clearly an accomplished draper, but the ensemble of the collection felt like a stiff homage to Halston, and one that jarred with the current zeitgeist. With most of the important major international collections featuring volume, intricate accessories and Photo shop prints, a print-less, mono-color largely linear collection like the one Zanini showed looked significantly out of step. In an age of the modern, understated baroque, Halston’s minimalism looks, well, dated.

Zanini’s program notes insisted on terming lots of opening looks in everything from chinchilla to double cashmere as composed of “Halston grey.” But this was the sort of depressing, muddy grey one sees on the shores of the North Atlantic on days when the suicide quotient tends to rise. Moreover insisting a formulaic amulet was in “Halston gold” when the actual object was, ahem, in a typical gold hue felt like clutching at straws.

That’s not to say that the collection did not contain strong looks, particularly for evening, when a final half dozen flowing gowns had plenty of pizzazz to work on a red carpet or at a sophisticated soiree. Yet too many passages, especially for day, were formulaic re-workings of Halston that would not have looked out of place on an Anne Klein runway.

Zanini is the fifth designer to have a crack at Halston since the designer’s premature death, and while his may well rank as the best at bat to date, it will not go down as a major renaissance, far from it.

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