Filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng — who’s made successful fashion documentaries on Christian Dior, Diana Vreeland and Valentino — is shooting a new film on famed New York designer Halston, Page Six has exclusively learned.
Sources say the doc will include interviews with the late designer’s close friends, models and muses such as Elsa Peretti and Marisa Berenson, as well as current top designer Tom Ford.
We hear that Tcheng has also interviewed Halston’s close friend R. Couri Hay, “who talked about the designer’s feud with the legendary haute courtier Charles James in the ’70s,” said an insider.
But besides the designer’s highs dressing famous clients like Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Betty Ford, Babe Paley and other top society figures of the era, a fashion source added, “Others who will face the cameras include Halston’s employees that worked for him during his tumultuous years at his office in the Olympic Tower at the end of his career, as his business empire collapsed.”
At the height of his fame as part of the Studio 54 scene with pals like Andy Warhol, the designer in 1978 moved his operation from a “cozy” 68th Street studio to the sprawling skyscraper. Halston model Chris Royer, recalled to Vanity Fair in 1991, “It was when we moved to the Olympic Tower that it all began to spin out of control . . . It was like ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ ” Halston died in 1990 in California of AIDS-related lung cancer.
Promo materials for the film from London-based distributor Dogwoof Global say the project is “partially based” on a 2014 book by Haltston’s niece Lesley Frowick, which had a foreward by Liza Minnelli.
The doc is described as capturing “the epic sweep of the designer’s life and the decades he literally and figuratively shaped,” and, “This is the life and times of an iconic ’70s Don Draper.” Tcheng wrote and directed “Dior and I,” co-directed “Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has To Travel,” and co-produced “Valentino: The Last Emperor.” A rep for the film didn’t get back to us.