Patricia Mears, Deputy Director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of technology in New York, will discuss the work of Roy Frowick Halston, one of the most important figures in late twentieth-century fashion history and America's first dressmaker superstar. Halston's dramatic rise and fall in the corporate realm and infamous drug-suffused evenings spent at Studio 54 tended to obscure his artistic legacy. Halston was a brilliant designer and innovative dressmaker. His languid personal style was translated into a range of garments that still influence designers today. Deceptively spare silk satin evening columns were cut from one piece of fabric and draped around the body in a spiral while featherweight chiffons were deftly draped to make flowing but simple caftans that were anything but the frothy and ruffled garments most typically associated with this fabric.

Related exhibition: Simply Halston

All talks at the IMA are ASL interpreted.