Roy Halston Frowick with Liza Minnelli (photograph via Madman Films)

Tcheng’s film is in part a standard documentary: file footage is interspersed with talking heads recounting their memories of Halston and of the heady days of Studio 54 when the designer’s fame was at its height. Interviewees include Halston’s lifelong friend Liza Minnelli, former Halstonettes (the entourage of models with whom the designer surrounded himself), and those who worked closely with – and against – him. What sees the film depart from this standard format is a somewhat contrived frame narrative that sets up the story as a policier or film noir. The usefulness of this framing to the story itself is debatable, and it is evident that Tcheng is trying to recapture something of the detective work he himself undertook when researching and making the film, literally piecing together a composite image of the man behind the clothes. Apart from the cross-backs to the narrator (played by actor and fashion writer Tavi Gevinson), who has been given the job of erasing more than two hundred VHS tapes of Halston fashion shows, parties, and events, and the odd reconstruction shot in kitsch noir style, the film rolls on in a fairly conventional way, relying largely on the star power of Halston and his friends (Andy Warhol, Pat Ast, Elizabeth Taylor, etc.) to retain our interest. And it is interesting, even if it lacks the centripetal force of a Raf Simons.

Roy Halston Frowick (photograph via Madman Films)

Tcheng started out as a camera operator and editor. He worked as both on the hit Netflix true crime series Making a Murderer, an experience he puts to some use in Halston, both in terms of narrative technique and stripped-back documentary aesthetic. In Dior and I, Tcheng’s expert camera placement comes to the fore; Halston, on the other hand, is a triumph of editing. There is a distance here that is almost the antithesis of the raw immediacy of Dior and I: Simons wears his heart on his sleeve, whereas everything in Halston’s life is affected, designed, staged, and set up. They are two very different designers, and these are two very different films. Fans of Dior and I may be disappointed, but this might be more a matter of perspective. Tcheng is doing something quite different here: true crime is on trend and Tcheng has tried to tap into the viewing public’s obvious appetite for this kind of storytelling. Like any good true-crime story, there is more here than meets the eye. Who is the victim and who the villain? Who ‘killed’ Halston? Was it American corporate greed? Was it his closest confidants? Or, in the manner of classical Greek tragedy, was it Halston himself?

Ultimately, Halston is an American tragedy in the spirit of The Great Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Halston is elusive, likeable, driven, self-made. The film owes a debt to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece not only in terms of its plot but also in terms of its study of the decadence of a generation and of one man’s desire to take up a place in it. It is also a snapshot of the beginning of the Reagan era and a world forever different from that which came before, one of profits over people, an attitude embodied by the corporate executives who shamelessly mock an ostensibly ruined Halston.

Unlike Simons in Dior and I, Halston is not there: what the film constructs is not an image of Halston but, to use Walter Benjamin’s term, an ‘after image’; a faint imprint somewhere on the retina of the American cultural imaginary. Tcheng’s film is a restoration – in both the photographic and the archaeological senses – of an all but erased figure whose legacy is all around us.

Halston (Madman Films) is directed by Frederic Tcheng and in cinemas September 19.