Pat Cleveland on the ‘Divinity’ of Fashion’s Halston Era / WWD
Halston and assistants fit models Cleveland (on the tabletop) Chris Royer, Kyle Trayl and Shirley Farro in “body dressing” from Halston’s fall 1977 advance. Fairchild Archive/Penske Media
Excerpt. The complete interview can be found on WWD here.
"He wasn’t like one brush paints all, he really had someone in mind when he designed these clothes," the model and former Halstonette says.
By Tara Donaldson for Women’s Wear Daily.
Pat Cleveland arrived in fashion at a time when American designers, then unremarkable, were preparing for their rise to fame. She arrived at a time when few knew who the now-renowned Halston even was. In fact, she arrived before Halston was Halston.
“I met him in 1968 at a party and I was with Stephen [Burrows] and Stephen was like, ‘You have to work for him,’ and nobody really knew who he was,” says Cleveland over Zoom from her home in New Jersey, ever-chic in her own House of VRC yogawear and, in keeping with the conversation, an Elsa Peretti bone cuff.
But the beloved model and muse would take Burrows’ advice and join Halston and what would become the Halstonettes, for the ride of their lives, a time she calls — if she had to distill it down to one word — divine.
“The catchphrases that we used, ‘Oh darling, you’re divine,’ that’s all that fashion talk,” she says, “[but] it was a good word. It’s a spiritual word, divine. Because it was divine. He was guided by his inner light and very protective of all of us and very generous with all of us, and that was kind of divine in its own way.”
Now, with the Netflix miniseries on the iconic American designer — known by his slicked hair and swagger, for his fluid frocks and career-ending J.C. Penney contract — dropping Friday, Cleveland talks about the real-life story, introducing Halston to Studio 54, and the one moment with the designer she’ll never forget.
WWD: Let’s get this out of the way first since you’ve already seen it — what are we in store for with the Halston Netflix series?
Pat Cleveland: You know, the way people put the movies together for dramatic effect is very suchen [a German word for seeking, reaching almost] so they have to put as much emotional impact and the dark compared to the light….And if you look at how they put everything together so suchen-ly, things don’t happen like that in real life. Really. No. People have a personal life and they have a business life, and then they have their friends and it’s not all bad. There’s a lot of good. So, the goodness that he had and the dramatic turning points that they showed — everybody’s allowed to have their life and their life lessons and I think that film, because it came now, is just to teach people that terrible things can happen, but the person who Halston was, was a really good person that terrible things happened to.
It was very emotional seeing this heartfelt and tragic look at those lessons that we all have to learn watching that film.
WWD: Well, what was it really like working with Halston?
P.C.: In real life he really had it under control, he was taking care of hundreds of people daily…
Bringing things down to practicality was a lot of business that he had to deal with because our world, fashion, is not about the practical, it’s about dreaming and life and lifestyle. [But] he could see women as being beautiful and he tried to make everybody — all women — beautiful, and that was sort of out of the perimeter of where you could go as a high fashion designer.
When he said, “I want to dress every woman in America,” what he was saying was I want every woman to feel beautiful and that was his goal, really. Whether he was high fashion and dressing ladies in society, he saw a woman as someone precious because, basically, he was dressing his mother. Most of the time he was thinking about “How am I going to dress my mother?” His mother [Hallie Frowick] was a large lady and he had someone like Pat Ast [American actress] come in who was very flamboyant and a big lady and he dressed her and nobody was doing that. He saw all sizes of women as being beautiful…he had us and then Elsa Peretti, she looked a little bit like a man and a woman, her statuesque bigness.
I think what was so wonderful about him was that he listened very well to who you were and what it is that you needed to bring you up to the platform, kind of putting us on a pedestal, each one of us. Suddenly, he would be designing and he would look at you and he was like in awe and then the thing would come over him. “Bill [Dugan, Halston’s right-hand man], D.D. [Ryan, former Harper’s Bazaar editor and an associate of Halston] get over here.” And he would throw the fabric on the floor and get those 12-foot-long scissors and chop through the fabric while it was lying on the floor on the bias and then pick the fabric up and then throw it on you and it’s a dress. He was so excited about that.
He had to control everything and working with him, it would be very zen in a way because it would be quiet and everybody quiet and then things would come into the room, like the inspiration. And he had pretty wild people around him that were entertaining, like Liza [Minnelli]. He would have these parties up at Olympic Towers and Liza would sing live and some movie stars would be there in the night twinkle…he loved his smooth jazz so he always had some band, some music playing smooth jazz.
WWD: Something about smooth jazz and the fluidity of Halston’s fashion seem to go well together. What was it like to be dressed in Halston?
P.C.: Oh, he always saw me twirling in his chiffons and I always felt like a moth, I was like, I’m flying to the light, I’m flying to the light. But little did I know he was the moth flying to the light and he got burned.
But our whole life was about moving chiffon, cashmere and bugle-beaded dresses, that was our life. Moving those clothes, animating those clothes. And we had this game we used to play, pivot-turn. So he’d call me into the room when there was a person or client and he’d say, “This is what we’re going to do,” before the client came in, “I’ll say pivot-turn and you do it.” And then he would say pivot-turn but he’d do it like 10 times so I was like a little robot on the thing going pivot-turn, pivot-turn, pivot-turn and then he’d say, “You see that? She can turn on the dime,” to the client.
He always was inspired by how much good he could do for so many people…[he once said], “When I walk down the street, if I see women feeling beautiful in my clothes, then I’ve done my job.”
That’s what he was about, individual looks for the ladies. He wasn’t like one brush paints all, he really had someone in mind when he designed these clothes.
…That’s kind of how it was.
The complete interview can be found on WWD here.
