Halston, a leading and influential fashion designer who created clothing both for the rich and famous and for millions of middle Americans, died March 26 at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. He had AIDS.
Although his status had declined in recent years, at the peak of his career in the 1970s, he was one of the most copied innovators in the fashion industry. Halston, 57, was known for a design style that was simple, elegant and timely, yet free of gimmickry. His clothing was carefully cut to show off the human body to its best advantage.
His designs bridged the generation gap. Women over 30 could wear them without looking as if they were trying to recapture a lost youth, and teenagers could wear them without looking inappropriately sophisticated.
His work included made-to-order collections for the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lauren Bacall, Bianca Jagger and Liza Minelli, as well as ready-to-wear, menswear, accessories and fragrances. In 1983 he added a cheaper Halston III line of clothes and accessories for the J.C. Penney department store chain, a move that cost him standing at the highest levels of the fashion industry.
He designed uniforms for the Girl Scouts, U.S. Olympic athletes, the New York City Police Department, Avis Rent-A-Car and Braniff Airlines. He did costumes for the Martha Graham ballet troupe and the Metropolitan Opera. He was a pioneer in the use of ultrasuede, a synthetic fabric much like suede.
As a pacesetter in a contentious and volatile industry, Halston had no fear of bucking prevailing trends. At the height of his authority, he could provoke a major story in the fashion media by cutting six inches from a hemline as a way of making a statement that the hemline needed to retreat, and he could provoke a major story by dropping the hemline to make the opposite point.
Newsweek magazine, in a 1972 cover story, called him the premier fashion designer in all America." Vogue once said "The Halston label on a dress or perfume tells a woman that what she's buying will be recognized as `right,' . . . that it's more than just stylish, it's in good taste."
Halston won four Coty Awards, the fashion industry equivalent of Hollywood's Oscars; one in 1962 and one in 1969 for millinery designs, one in 1971 and another in 1972 for knitwear designs, matte jersey dresses and beaded evening clothes. He was elected to the Coty Hall of Fame in 1974.
He was born Roy Halston Frowick in Des Moines. Halston created his first fashion design on Easter Day 1945 when he made a red hat and veil for his mother. His family moved to Evansville, Ind., after World War II. He attended Indiana University for two years before enrolling at the Chicago Art Institute.
While a student in Chicago, he designed department store window displays. In his spare time he stitched hats on a second-hand sewing machine in his apartment. Later he talked the hairdresser at Chicago's Ambassador Hotel into displaying some of his creations. They were so well received that at the age of 21, Halston opened his own millinery shop at the hotel.
Among his first clients was Fran Allison of the television show "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." Others included Kim Novak, Gloria Swanson, Hedda Hopper and Deborah Kerr.
In 1957 he moved to New York City to work in Lilly Dache's hat division, then in 1958 transferred to Bergdorf Goodman, where he eventually became chief milliner. Jacqueline Kennedy was one of his early customers there. Halston designed the celebrated beige felt pillbox hat she wore to her husband's presidential inauguration in 1961.
In this period, Bergdorf Goodman was the largest U.S. retail outlet for European fashions, and Halston made trips twice yearly to Europe, where he purchased hat samples to be duplicated for Bergdorf's American customers.
His first venture beyond the world of hat design came in 1966, when he designed an 18-piece interchangeable collection of jackets, dresses, coats, and a red ski outfit that included full-length knickers and a Cossack-like overblouse. After that Halston split his time between millinery duties and designing custom apparel.
He left Bergdorf Goodman to go into business for himself in 1968, signing a contract with Lin-Mac Hat Co. to manufacture an inexpensive line of hats that were sold in hat bars nationwide. Later that year he launched his own clothing business, operating out of an old town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side that had once been the childhood home of Franklin D. Roosevelt. There he produced a ready-to-wear collection sold in select stores around the nation.
In 1973 he sold his business and the Halston trademark to the Norton Simon conglomerate in a $16 million deal that permitted Norton Simon to use the Halston name for products he did not design. It also barred Halston from using his name on any product without Norton Simon's permission.
In the 1980s, after successive corporate takeovers of Norton Simon, Halston made several legal efforts to regain the right to design under his own name, but he was unsuccessful. Bergdorf Goodman announced it would no longer carry his line after announcement of the 1983 deal with J.C. Penney. Soon afterward, his company was disassembled by its new corporate owners in a cost-cutting effort. Although the Halston name still appeared on the J.C. Penney labels, the actual design was being done by someone else.
Revlon bought the Halston name in 1986 and used it on a popular fragrance line simply called "Halston."
Once a visible and ubiquitous figure on New York's social circuit, known for his lavish parties and his appearances at Studio 54 during the nightclub's heyday, Halston had been away from the public spotlight in recent years. "There really isn't much to celebrate," he told The New York Times in 1987 when asked why he no longer gave his parties.
Survivors include two brothers and a sister.
PAULINE LAWRENCE
Government & Church Secretary
Pauline Lawrence, 81, a former government and church secretary who was a member of the National Baptist Memorial Church in Washington, died of cancer March 25 at the Bethesda Retirement and Nursing Home. She lived in Washington.

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It is difficult to know, even now, if Halston was a great American designer or merely seized a great American opportunity.
For five really brilliant years, at the juncture of the '60s and '70s, he was certainly the most talked-about American designer, the man who dressed Liza Minnelli, Marisa Berenson and Jacqueline Onassis. Newsweek gave him a cover story and called him "the premier fashion designer for all America," while Esquire wondered "Will Halston take over the world?" By 1980, he had at least covered the world with his name - on belts, sheets, gloves, furs, bras, suitcases, wallets and tennis towels. Even the Girl Scouts had uniforms designed by Halston.
"Everybody has got to love the Girl Scouts," he declared in 1976. "After all, it's the biggest ladies' organization in the free world."
He was articulate if glib, charming yet imperious. He was also a bona fide American character, the sort of ambitious young man who arrived one day in New York on a bus from the Midwest and set out to become someone. Roy Halston Frowick was, in fact, self-made - as Halston the hat maker, as Halston the celebrity designer, as Halston the man who sold his name. If, in the end, he became something of a caricature - the omnipresent night crawler in sunglasses with an entourage and a drug habit - that, too, was a distinctly American scenario.
"I've had a great life," Halston told Minnelli in the fall of 1989. Five months later, at the age of 57, he was dead, a victim of AIDS. Halston's life comes into focus this month with the publication of a biography by Steven Gaines and, opening tomorrow, a retrospective of his clothes at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Titled "Halston: Absolute Modernism," the FIT exhibit will include 100 ensembles with accessories loaned by a number of his regular clients, among them Minnelli and model Chris Royer, who was part of the designer's entourage of Halstonettes. The show will convey some of the glitter of that era as well Halston's trademark modernism - those simple clothes that, as Curator Richard Martin says, "a Quaker would be happy wearing."
As it happens, the timing of the exhibit and the biography, "Simply Halston," is coincidental. "We thought it was time to do a true modernist show," says Martin. "We did not come initially to Halston, but then, as we approached it, a Halston retrospective seemed right. His fashion was modern. It was pure." Martin sees Halston's influence extending into the '90s, in the streets and in the work of such young designers as Isaac Mizrahi. "I would like to think that the FIT show will prove Halston to be a great American designer," says Martin.
Gaines's biography offers a more conditional view of Halston's life. One of the reasons designers seldom make "good copy" for biographies is that their early years are rarely as interesting as what they accomplish later on, and even then their lives seem narrowly defined by the more mundane aspects of the fashion business. Halston is one of those rare subjects whose meager past - Midwestern, nomadic, working class - became a counterpoint to his years in New York. It could explain his grand manner, the affectations, and why, without any kind of conventional constraints, he felt he could have whatever he wanted. If he wanted to be a couturier in the tradition of Balenciaga, then he would be. "In his mind - and perhaps in the judgment of the world - he had become the American Balenciaga," writes Gaines. It also stood to reason that he could have, along with the "right" Baccarat crystal and the 30 pairs of $600 handmade shoes, a list of call boys and a preference, according to Gaines, for "well-endowed black men."
This side of Halston's life, though not exactly secret, was in direct contrast to his public role as designer and confidant to the women who loved his clothes: Babe Paley, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Walters, Bianca Jagger, Mirella Agnelli and Ali MacGraw, among the most visible. "He was like a big brother to me and a lot of women," Minnelli once said. He could be incredibly generous, warm and funny. In her autobiography, "Blood Memory," Martha Graham tells how, after borrowing a Halston caftan, she offered to pay it off monthly. Halston replied, "Martha, if I can't give you that dress, then there's nothing in the world I can give you." For all his self-indulged pleasures, he could be just as selfless.
"He knew," Gaines says in an interview, "how to be interested in people."
More than that, he knew what women wanted: a sleek, uncomplicated kind of luxury. "He really defined American fashion at an epochal phase," says Gaines. "He came along at the right time with great style." When Halston's salon business took off in the late '60s, on a $125,000 investment from a Texas matron, fashion was in flux - and the Swinging Sixties in flight. The midi, the maxi, would come and go. The fact that Halston's earliest collections were small didn't matter. He would show the same precise jacket - or the same unconstructed tunic - done first in cashmere, then in silk and later in jersey. The impact was devastatingly simple and, of course, elegant.
Looking back, the years between 1968, when he opened his first salon, and 1973, when he sold his business to Norton Simon Industries for $12 million, were probably his best, or at least his most purely creative. In 1972, with partners, he opened a ready-to-wear business on Seventh Avenue and it was immediately successful. He popularized Ultrasuede. "I'm the ultra-designer," he declared, after selling 78,000 copies of one Ultrasuede shirtwaist dress with a tie belt. When Newsweek marveled at Halston's allure, even he seemed struck by his own good fortune.
"Why, I don't know, but it is my time now," he said. "I've worked hard for 20 years and I've always had success. I've always dreamed of being a total designer and now it may come true."
It is somewhat significant, at least to Gaines, that in 1980, after observing Halston for more than a decade on the party scene, particularly at Studio 54, he wrote a roman a` clef called "The Club," in which the central character was a designer named Ellison who had "a ruinous cocaine habit" and a depressed celebrity pal named Jacky - "with a y." The parallels to Halston and Minnelli were blatant, and Gaines writes that he "became persona non grata at any place where Halston or his tightly knit group of friends had any influence."
Gaines regrets writing the nasty novel. "I made Halston into a buffoon and I hurt a lot of people," he says. "I came to realize there was a whole other side to Halston that I had missed." Needless to say, "The Club" made it impossible for Gaines to talk to Halston before his death or, knowing the injury it caused Minnelli, from seeking her assistance.
He did manage to talk to Halston's three siblings, notably his brother, Robert Frowick, a former career diplomat with the State Department, but they did not endorse the biography. In an enigmatic statement in the introduction, Gaines thanks them "for their benign indifference." What he means is that the Frowicks did not interfere with his research. They weren't interested in a biography of their brother, says Gaines, but "they said, `We don't want you to get it wrong.' I can't tell you how many times I was on the phone with Bob Frowick. He was always helpful and I have tremendous respect for him."
And yet his personal accounting of an immature decision to sandbag Halston also sets up the peculiar dichotomy in the designer's life. To a great many people who knew or saw him during the Studio 54 days, or at the parties at his East 63rd Street house, Halston did appear decadent. So, for that matter, did the scene: the drugs, the free-for-all sex in the balcony at Studio 54, the raging egos. "There came a point when Halston's popularity turned a corner and his whole persona started to wear thin, when the smugness and self-congratulatory behavior, the grandness, the pretensions, the snotty superiority of his crowd became tired," writes Gaines.
In any case, the last 10 or so years of his life were his least creative and most difficult. "He began to think like a rock star," said Women's Wear Daily Publisher John Fairchild. He began to believe his own press, and the notion that he was, or might have been, America's Balenciaga seemed more like American hyperbole. Gaines's documentation of the corporate maze that Halston entered upon his deal with Norton Simon is impressive; as the years went by, and one corporation bought out another, Halston became more confused, lost and paranoid. And even more imperious. "His ego was just beyond belief," says Gaines. The J.C. Penney's deal, to produce a separate Halston line for the mass retailer, turned out to be a fiasco.
In 1986 Revlon acquired the business, and there appeared to be, at least publicly, a chance that Halston might recover some design control. But negotiations drifted and Halston was no more in control than he was before Revlon and its chairman, Ronald Perelman, arrived. If Perelman had once been impressed with Halston, according to Gaines, his opinion changed: Halston was a "sleazeball."
Gaines believes that Halston should not have designed for the masses, because it wasn't his sensibility. Martin suggests that, in fact, he may have been "proto Gap," that his notion of ease and simplicity preceded the current era of designer "basics." Maybe. But with Halston, it is impossible to separate the career from the man, the style from the lifestyle. "You're only as good as the people you dress," he loved to say. And a designer is only as good as what he designs. Halston's achievement was creating something perfect and precise at the perfect moment in history.

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Halston, who started his fashion career in the basement of Chicago's Ambassador Hotel and went on to become one of the country's most influential designers, died Monday night in San Francisco at age 57.
According to his brother, Robert Frowick, the 57-year-old designer died after a 1 1/2-year battle against AIDS and an AIDS-related cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma.
The designer died in his sleep at 11:21 p.m. at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital, according to a hospital spokesman.
Born Roy Halston Frowick in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1932, Halston first gained fame as a milliner, creating such style landmarks as Jacqueline Kennedy's pillbox hats. He went on to design elegant, tasteful clothes that were worn by the likes of Lauren Bacall, Catherine Deneuve, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli and Candice Bergen.
His "less is more" dressing philosophy brought him the highest honors in the fashion world.
After winning four Coty Awards - the most prestigious award in American fashion at the time - he was elected to the Coty Hall of Fame in 1974. One of his best-known contributions to fashion was the use of Ultrasuede. His matte jersey evening gowns became a signature.
"Halston's death points up the devastating effect that AIDS is having on the fashion industry," said Dorothy Fuller, director of the Chicago Apparel Center. "You're made aware of it by the people with a high profile but you realize there must be hundreds of others who are afflicted or who have died from this horrible disease."
Other designers who have died of AIDS include Perry Ellis, Willi Smith, and the fashion illustrator Antonio.
Halston was raised in Evansville, Ind., and studied at Indiana University and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He started selling his hats in the early 1950s at the beauty salon of the Ambassador Hotel, which is now the Ambassador West. Hollywood notables stopping over in Chicago started buying them.
One of his early customers was Fran Allison of "Kukla, Fran and Ollie." He was soon designing hats for Deborah Kerr, Kim Novak and Hedda Hopper.
Halston's big break came after Peg Zwecker, who was fashion editor at the Chicago Daily News from 1950 to 1978, discovered him and introduced him to the famous milliner Lilly Dache. Dache, who died a few months ago, hired Halston to work for her in New York.
"He had such excellent taste," said Zwecker, who is now retired and was reached on vacation in Florida. "What was amazing was the way he would immediately suggest to a woman the best hat for her. She would try on eight or nine and go back to the one he suggested."
In 1958, Bergdorf Goodman's millinery department hired Halston away from Dache, and he later started designing clothes for the store.
"Elegance, simplicity and good taste" were his hallmarks, said Zwecker. "He simplified things, yet they were very dashing. You could always recognize a Halston. He put American fashion in the limelight."
C. Crawford Mills, who served as president of Halston Sportswear from 1978 to 1981 and is now a marketing consultant to apparel manufacturers, said, "I think he was responsible for what a lot of other designers are carrying on today - a clean, American look. He was a real classicist. There isn't anyone now who comes close."
Halston's personal uniform was a black turtleneck and pants and he required his staff to also wear black. He maintained a perpetual tan and was counted among the regulars at the disco Studio 54 in the '70s.
He had all but disappeared from the fashion world by the mid-1980s. The beginning of the end came in 1973, when Halston sold the rights to his name to Norton Simon and gave up control over the use of his name on products.
He started designing an inexpensive line of clothing for J. C. Penney in 1982 that tarnished his name in the eyes of specialty stores like Bergdorf Goodman, which subsequently stopped carrying his clothing. At the time, Halston had more than 30 licensing deals worldwide.
His name was acquired by Beatrice and eventually bought by Revlon, which manufactures his fragrances, in 1986.
Halston is survived by two brothers and a sister.

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The crazy parties at Studio 54 and his highbrow celebrity alliances tend to cloud our memories of Halston. But two biographers want to shift the focus to what made him really legendary - his designs.
Halston: An American Original by Elaine Gross and Fred Rottman (HarperCollins, $50) is a coffee-table tome that cuts through the fluff and gives the bottom line on Halston's genius as a socialite, a designer and a businessman. It comes nine years after Steven Gaines' book, Simply Halston, caused waves for its gossipy tone and egregious errors.
"Other articles focused on his personal life . . . his fast lifestyle," says Rottman, who worked with Halston from 1978 to 1981, cataloging patterns. "We wanted to bring forth what really made him Halston - it was his craft and work."
Says Gross, "This is to give Halston his due. This is to make sure the very things he originated - the design and marketing concepts - were credited to him."
History credits Roy Halston Frowick, who died of AIDS on March 26, 1990, with giving Jacqueline Kennedy the pillbox hat; developing intricate pieces that wrapped, draped and tied rather than zipped or buttoned, and for creating strong licensing liaisons for bath and bed products, luggage - even carpets.
The new book's strength is in the interviews Gross and Rottman conducted with fashion editors, clients and Halston's former staff. They help to resurrect the spirit and drive of a man whose success was built on a platform of perfectionism.
This character trait, which manifested itself in every aspect of the designer's personal and professional life, was what catapulted him from Chicago's Ambassador Hotel salon to Bergdorf Goodman to an Upper East Side showroom, in just 15 short years.
"He had his own personal taste," says Peg Zwecker, a former Chicago Daily News fashion editor, who discovered Halston at the Ambassador and is quoted in the book. "He was interested in what women wore - even down to the size of the purse and the stockings."
Zwecker says that at the time, it was hard to imagine a man could be so attuned to every detail of a woman's attire.
He was known for "designing hats" for his mother using flowers picked from the garden, giving his sister a makeover by putting her in 3-inch red heels, and dressing Grace Mirabella - former Vogue editor - for her trips to cover the European collections. Mirabella says in the book she "always felt he had a thought, a plot, a plan."
But while such attention to detail was good for his faithful clientele, it was rough on his staff, particularly his design assistant Bill Dugan.
"The people who worked with him saw him as a taskmaster . . . and it often created tension," Gross says. "Clients saw another side. When he was with a client, you felt like you were the only one in the room."
His patternmakers, whom Halston relied on for their expertise since he never learned to make patterns himself, received the royal treatment, says Gross. "He was a funny mix - a complex person."
To Rottman, Halston's ability to transform nothing into something was profound.
He recalls seeing a hall leading from the assistant's office to Halston's, where mirrors reflected multiple fabric bolts. Within eight weeks, those textiles were transformed into racks of garments.
Says Rottman, "There weren't hardly any buttons and prints. These clothes were magnificent.
"From those bolts of fabrics, they not only showed magnificence but they also influenced fashion then . . . making the front page of Women's Wear Daily."
Halston's simple approach to design still appears in many collections today, including those by Kevan Hall, who designs under the Halston nameplate.
"I hope people read the book and come away with the fact that he influenced fashion," says Rottman. "He was the first true minimalist. He believed in a singular (design) concept and stuck to his guns. He put American fashion on the map."

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He designed Jacqueline Kennedy's pillbox hat and Elizabeth Taylor's caftans. Lauren Bacall, Diana Vreeland, Lee Radziwill, Happy Rockefeller, Barbara Walters wore clothes that he conceived. And he became as famous as they were. He was America's first celebrity designer.
Halston died in his sleep Monday, at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco. He was 57. His brother, Robert Frowick, said yesterday that the designer had struggled for more than a year with AIDS and an AIDS-related cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma.
"Insecure people dress extravagantly," he said in 1973 during his heyday. He designed for confidence instead.
He loved black jersey and cashmere and Ultrasuede. Halston refigured the idea of what was feminine and created what is now called American Style. His lines were clean-no ruffles or puffed sleeves or full skirts. He was famous for the casual shirtdresses he designed, for sheaths and for pantsuits.
Sleek and tall and beautiful, Halston was as confident as his clothes. Always tan, his smile perfect, he sauntered through the '70s disco scene in Manhattan with every hair in place, each crease pressed. He had a uniform: black turtleneck, black trousers.
Halston was the '70s in a way. There were all-nighters at Studio 54 with his famous friends Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger. The Bee Gees music could be heard from the street-where common kids from the boroughs lined up in their designer jeans and sometimes never got inside. Club owner Steve Rubell-who died last year of hepatitis-was always in some private lounge upstairs. Andy Warhol would bring his Polaroid. There were drugs on the dance floor, cocaine in the bathrooms and back rooms. There were weekends on Fire Island, and parties, parties, always more parties.
In the fashion world, Halston embodied then Vogue editor Grace Mirabella's favorite word, "modern." His designs were simple and wearable, never grand or pompous. There were no exotic touches left over from the '60s, no peasant skirts or wild batiks. He sensed early on, even before the hippies were finished, that it was time for something quieter and more practical.
He died Monday, but in many ways he was already gone. Once America's richest and most successful designer, he suffered from the problems of his times-drugs and takeovers and perhaps just too much celebrity. He slipped slowly into oblivion. He stopped partying.
"Lifestyles change," he said last summer. "People don't go out to nightclubs the way they used to."
Halston used only one name-all that he owned became bound up in those seven letters-and he lost it. His fame still growing in 1973, he sold his label, simply "Halston," for $16 million to conglomerate Norton Simon Inc., which also owned Avis car rentals, Max Factor cosmetics and Hunt-Wesson Foods.
And his rights to design began to vanish. New Halston products began to come out-shoes and handbags, perfume, cosmetics. His trademark was on them-but they were things that the designer hadn't designed.
"It's who I am," he said of his name last year. "They can sell it tomorrow. To me, it's more personal."
By 1982, his name turned up at JC Penney, on a line of clothes called Halston III. This so outraged Bergdorf Goodman, the fancy New York department store where Halston had made his start, that an announcement was made: Bergdorf would no longer sell Halston anything.
And the takeovers began. Norton Simon was taken over by Esmark Inc., which owned Playtex. And Esmark was taken over by the Beatrice companies. Parts of the Halston label were dismantled and sold off, and the designer-in October 1984-was removed totally from designing. He was still being paid-but to not design. In 1986, Beatrice sold Halston's name to Revlon.
"We are all deeply saddened by Halston's death," Revlon Chairman Ron Perelman said yesterday. "He was an American leader of design and style who helped to define his entire era. He will be sorely missed."
Roy Halston Frowick was born April 23, 1932, in Des Moines, and attended Indiana University and the Art Institute of Chicago. He came to New York City in 1957, and worked for Lilly Dache-a well-known milliner-for a year, before heading to Bergdorf's hats department to design.
"Making hats," he said, "is tremendously good training for being a dress designer. You learn to think in three dimensions."
After his successes there-most notably Kennedy's inauguration day pillbox-Halston began designing Bergdorf's ready-to-wear fashions. He opened his own couture house in 1968. He was elected to Coty's Fashion Hall of Fame in 1974.
His death was the latest of so many that have saddened the fashion industry and depleted its talent. Major designers Perry Ellis and Willi Smith both died of AIDS in recent years. Designer Angel Estrada died of AIDS last September. Designer Isaia died of respiratory failure last June; designer Giorgio Sant'Angelo died of lung cancer last August. Designer Patrick Kelly died of bone marrow disease less than three months ago.
Halston's clean, simple lines continue. Nancy Reagan's one-shouldered inaugural dress designed by Galanos in 1981 looked like a Halston. The designs of Donna Karan and Calvin Klein today carry forward the same spare American ideas.
"I think my look was the most attractive and sensible," Halston said in an interview last April. "I'm proud. I'm happy. It proves it still works."

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He created clothes so simple and glamorous that he became the king of American fashion in the 1970s.
In the 1980s, he lost everything, the result of bad business decisions and his own seedy lifestyle. But his name - Halston - never quite shed its luster.
The task of restoring the Halston label to its former glory has fallen to Kevan Hall, a designer who formerly lived in Los Angeles and who excels at luxurious, body-conscious evening wear.
A lot is riding on his success, but the soft-spoken, always impeccably groomed designer never seems to sweat.
"I share the same esthetic with Halston the man," he said. "As a young design student, I feel like I cut my design teeth watching him do his simple, elegant collections. That's what I wanted to do. I did beautiful suitings and built a reputation doing evening dresses and separates."
The Halston empire changed hands and management so often after its tumble that archives are slim.
But Hall still is able to study his predecessor, partly through a huge collection of vintage Halston clothes owned by a Beverly Hills shop, and also by buying pieces at vintage fairs.
"Halston is one of the biggest collectibles," he said. "So many women have Halston gowns that don't even fit anymore, but they hold on to them because they like them."
Halston was famous for his wonderful draping, bias-cut dresses, halter tops and the use of comfortable, more casual fabrics such as cashmere and jersey. Both are liberally used in Hall's fall collection.
"Jersey is very sensual and fluid," said Hall, who has the marvelous facility of remembering that women are not mannequins. His jersey gowns come with a smaller-cut jersey lining that "molds to your body, so the outer layer floats. It creates a wonderful look and enables women to wear it."
Hall gained firsthand experience in pleasing customers when he had his own business, Kevan Hall Couture, in Los Angeles. Hall designed a line of evening wear, cocktail dresses and suits, and marketed it with the help of his wife, Debbie, from 1982 to 1992.
The line sold at Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, and in designer boutiques.
In 1996, while Hall was working as a fashion consultant, the Halston clothing line was revived, with sportswear specialist Randolph Duke as head designer. The next year, Duke asked Hall, a former classmate, to design the luxury line.
Duke breathed new life into the Halston label, but the company had internal problems. In 1998, the sportswear division was closed and the Halston name was sold again. Duke reportedly was fired; he filed a breach-of-contract suit that was settled out of court.
In July 1998, Hall - who had left the company for a few months - was brought back as head designer.
At that time, he was unknown to most of the fashion world. He became an instant celebrity, though, with his first Halston collection as head designer; the spring '99 show of gowns with an oceanic theme won raves from fashion editors.
In his private life, Hall isn't much like the hard-partying Halston, who died in 1990 of complications from AIDS.
Hall, who has a home near Los Angeles and an apartment in Manhattan, said he likes to refinish furniture and take his two children fishing. He is redecorating his traditional house in a modernist style from the 1930s, with "clean lines, beautiful woods and leathers," and a limestone and wood floor in the kitchen.

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