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"    Whitney Sudler-Smith, the creator of Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston, poses (sans the Boogie Nights mustache he sports in his documentary) with Sarah Jessica Parker on the red carpet. Last Friday was the world premiere of Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston at the Tribeca Film Festival, a documentary about one of American fashion&amp;#039;s most tumultuous legacies. Among a swarm of fashionistas decked out in vintage Halston dresses, Whitney Sudler-Smith, the film&amp;#039;s creator, posed with Sarah Jessica Parker, while Marc Jacobs slipped by incognito. But the star of the evening really was the lost 70&amp;#039;s icon himself, Roy Halston. &amp;quot;The seventies had everything,&amp;quot; Sudler-Smith says in the movie&amp;#039;s opening, &amp;quot;sex, drugs, fashion, and&amp;quot;\u2014to borrow from the designer&amp;#039;s plaque on the Fashion Walk of Fame\u2014&amp;quot;the seventies belonged to Halston.&amp;quot; His 1973 show at Versailles, the first year American designers were invited to present their work alongside top French fashion houses, was such a hit that Yves St. Laurent apparently threw his book in the air with excitement. But while Halston put American fashion on the map, few who grew up after the era of Studio 54 know about his reign as the country&amp;#039;s first celebrity designer. Ultrasuede maps Halston&amp;#039;s spectacular rise in the party culture of the 70&amp;#039;s, and his label&amp;#039;s disappointing decline in the 80&amp;#039;s, when Halston lost the rights to his brand name and was ruined by a disastrous\u2014though, considering the high-low state of fashion today, revolutionary\u2014billion-dollar partnership with JC Penney. Sudler-Smith, who suffers from self-diagnosed &amp;quot;era envy&amp;quot; and spends most of the movie strutting around in an ironic Burt Reynolds get-up, is just as interested in how the 70&amp;#039;s created Halston as he is in how Halston created the 70&amp;#039;s.   Halston was a talk show regular, a Studio 54 staple, and a close friend of Andy Warhol and his entourage. But while his lifestyle was one of excess, his designs were pure, elegant minimalism. Sudler-Smith calls him &amp;quot;an extremist&amp;quot; for living only on either end of the dial. In the end, though, the film presents him as a gifted artist. Ralph Rucci, whose first job was cutting muslins for Halson, recalls a particularly stirring memory of the designer taking a pair of scissors to a bolt of fabric and suddenly turning it into a dress. What other designer, Rucci asks the audience, can so easily see a piece of fabric in three dimensions and turn it into something beautiful? Roy Halston died in 1990 of AIDS-related cancer, and he was eulogized on TV news stations with only one factoid\u2014historical though it may be\u2014that he designed Jackie O&amp;#039;s famous pillbox hat. And now, after a staggering number of corporate acquisitions and inheritances, Halston&amp;#039;s sketches, photos, and designs are stored in a downtrodden storage room in Lipscomb Bible College, the irony of which would be delicious if it wasn&amp;#039;t so depressing. So Sudler-Smith instead recreates Halston&amp;#039;s life and faded legacy through the insights of friends and fashion aficionados.  He starts by meeting Halston&amp;#039;s best friend, Liza Minnelli, in the New York apartment he had decorated for her. Minnelli was one of the many 70&amp;#039;s icons that regularly wore Halston\u2014including Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, and Candice Bergen, who he dressed for Andy Warhol&amp;#039;s Black and White Ball. Halston was, in fact, the person who brought together Minnelli and her one true love\u2014sequins\u2014after seeing her leave stage soaked in sweat. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re already shining,&amp;quot; he told her, &amp;quot;So you might as well shine all over!&amp;quot; From there, Sudler-Smith seeks the insights of, among others, Cathy Horyn, Anjelica Huston (one of the Halstonettes), and Diane Von Furstenberg. But the movie&amp;#039;s greatest insights come from the personal testimony of Rucci and former Halston model Pat Cleveland, both of whom sat down for a panel discussion after the film, moderated by Matt Tyrnauer, director of Valentino: The Last Emperor. Together, the panels shared their thoughts on Halston. Tyrnauer expressed shock that the announcement of Halston&amp;#039;s death was marked only with a bit of Kennedy-headwear trivia, ignoring over a decade of six-ply cashmere, &amp;quot;one-note&amp;quot; monochrome looks, and flowing winged dresses, all of which Halston brought into vogue. Rucci lamented that his mentor&amp;#039;s memory is so often marred by the &amp;quot;provincial&amp;quot; objections to his elevated, but still somewhat typical 70&amp;#039;s lifestyle. And Cleveland, who Halston called &amp;quot;the moth&amp;quot; for the way she fluttered down the runway, compared wearing his clothes to &amp;quot;being wrapped in music, and as you move, a different part of the fabric touches a different note on your body&amp;quot;\u2014and what a lovely note it was to end the evening on. \u2014Nojan Aminosharei Photo: Getty Images "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/news/a4025/ultrasuede-in-search-of-halston-premieres-at-tribeca-741/>