#Liza minelli and halston series

I am nervous watching a man be reduced to the misery induced by his sexual preferences and Halston is so wracked that the freedom and colour he gave women is – and this is absurd - slightly muted. Halston it is likewise sanitised: quite often it is glib. There is a tendency to sanitise biopics of gay men, to make them palatable: Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, a gay man’s story written by his bewildered straight colleagues and Elton John in the self-serving Rocketman. So is his fall: to drug addiction, to sex addiction, to heartbreak, and to Studio 54, the brief-flowering New York City nightclub that defined the decadence of the late 1970s in America.

(I think he was trying to sound like Orson Welles and I don’t blame him.īut he was born in Dees Moines, Iowa). It details Halston’s rise from Jackie Kennedy’s milliner – he made the pillbox hat she wore to her husband’s inauguration - to couturier to pusher of cheap mass fashion, and McGregor does a fair impersonation of his contradictions, his expressions – under the sunglasses he always wore - and his ridiculous voice. The show isn’t as creative as the man it is named for: how could it be? Netflix is gaudy and well-funded, but it is not imaginative, as its subjects were.

#Liza minelli and halston series

Minnelli is in Halston from Netflix, a new five-part series about the most original designer America ever produced, with the ever-watchable Ewan McGregor as her best friend Roy (Halston) Frowick. I didn’t care for Sex and the City and its grasping archetype hags – it was consumerist Feminism, empty Feminism - but it is right in this sense, if only by coincidence or mistake. It is a truism – and a joke from the Sex and the City 2 – that whenever there is a peak of gay energy in any room, Liza Minnelli automatically appears.