Halston

If you know nothing about Roy Halston Frowick, director Frédéric Tcheng's sleek, accessible documentary gives even the poorly dressed a handle on the American designer, known simply as Halston, who virtually created the fashion business as we know it. It's framed by a nosy researcher (Gevinson) investigating the story, and we're led into a sprawling empire that stretched from influential runway collections to mass-market clothing lines. A photogenic Iowa native, workaholic Roy Halston Frowick began as a milliner in Chicago and for the upmarket New York department store Bergdorf. Soon, he was putting a pillbox hat on Jackie Kennedy and making hot pants and shirt-dresses for the must-haves in the 1960s and 70s. Accompanied by a mass of expected vintage footage, stills, advertisements and talking heads, models and stars tell of Halston's lust for glamour and fame as well as industry domination. The most heart-stopping moment isn't Liza Minnelli refusing, with a wink, to say anything bad about her friend Halston, but seeing what few items remain of his patterns and samples. A more complete archive would have given an idea of the inspiration for his perfect, bias-cut dresses, crafted from a single piece of cloth. Halston was mind-bogglingly innovative, among his new ideas were the use of diverse models, the creation of a bestselling signature scent and the redesigning of the 1976 American Olympic team uniform. The drugs, the parties and the brutal business climate that ultimately took his business down in the 1980s are quickly and breathlessly covered, leaving a concentrated essence of Halston, who died at 57 in 1990, of Aids-related complications. The movie leaves us wanting more - and one of his dresses, too.