Halston

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a room emptying: heels, a door, then quiet)
Roy Halston Frowick. Of Des Moines, Iowa.

[Verse 1]
He made a hat for a first lady and the country saw the hat,
a little pillbox, nineteen sixty-one, and that was that —
he was the milliner, then the designer, then the name,
then the parties, then the seventies, then the whole entire flame.
Ultrasuede and cashmere and a line as clean as breath.
He dressed the way the decade wanted so the decade let him.

[Chorus]
Halston. Halston. He sold it in 'seventy-three.
Then he signed with JC Penney and the fashion world went cold,
and Bergdorf dropped him overnight, the store that made him first,
and the company he'd sold to turned around and let him go.
Halston. Halston. Barred from his own name.
He could not design as Halston. He was Halston. All the same.

[Verse 2]
Think on that a second. Not "he lost the company" —
he was legally prevented from making anything
under the word his mother gave him, in his own hand,
for the rest of his living life. He tried to buy it back.
They wouldn't sell. They never sold. He never made another line.
Six years of that. And then he died. Nineteen ninety.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There's a version of this story that is all about the parties,
the Studio Fifty-Four of it, the glitter and the fall,
and everybody tells it that way 'cause it's easier to tell.
But this is a story about a signature. That's all.
About a word that was a person, sold for cash, in good faith,
and how the word kept working and the person could not.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the room, quiet)
His name is still on things.
He hasn't been allowed to touch them since 1984.