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source | nytimes
August 26, 2007
The Talk
The New Halston?
By Cathy Horyn
When Harvey Weinstein announced this spring that he was going into the dress business, a couple of magazines made a fuss, but for the most part the fashion people treated him exactly as they would any newcomer. They regarded him with surprise and suspicion. It makes no difference that Weinstein is a successful producer of movies (he and his brother, Bob, started Miramax Films) and that those movies defied all kinds of conventions to win a total of 45 Oscars. Nor is there anything about his person that would send a fashion editor up the wall. He is polite, gregarious, at times charming. None of the bad faults for which he is legendary in Hollywood — the screaming, the harassing — are on display in fashion circles. And maybe it is for that reason that something about the sight of this bearish hetero sitting among the thin, knowing fashionistas compels sympathy as much as bemusement. Instead of getting in someone’s face, Weinstein, in this environment, has the companionable air of a man holding out his mitts so his wife can unwind her knitting yarn.
The truth is, the fashion world knows its business very well and doesn’t believe that someone else, no matter how clever and energetic he may be, can know it better. Weinstein has bought Halston, and as far as anyone can tell, at this stage, he has bought a pig in a poke. Only one individual has succeeded in getting Halston right, and that was Halston, the dashing, self-seeking Iowan whose particular gift was to create the illusion that a dress or a pair of evening pajamas was as earthbound as a charcoal sketch.
His clothes were beautiful, precise and intoxicating. He enjoyed the celebrity of a ballplayer; even the Girl Scouts could find nothing to object to and had him design their uniforms. (Being pure of heart, the Scouts didn’t think to inquire about the drugs and call boys.) Yet all too quickly, Halston became the supreme example of what you don’t do as a designer — don’t sell your name, don’t trust big corporations, don’t believe your own press.
By the late 1980s, he had been cashiered by Revlon (he died in 1990), and since then the Halston name has seemed, well, jinxed.
Weinstein insists that he isn’t aiming to be a fashion mogul, like his friend Bernard Arnault,the chairman of LVMH Moat Hennessy Louis Vuitton, who is also an investor in the Weinstein Company. Harvey has always pursued outside activities, like political fund-raising, and the Weinstein brothers are owners in several restaurants, including Cipriani in London. Still, Harvey has been at every A-list fashion event — Tom Ford's party in April, the Dior couture show at Versailles in July, Valentino’s 45th-anniversary bash in Rome. On those occasions he was with Georgina Chapman, his English girlfriend of two and a half years, who, with Keren Craig, designs Marchesa, a three-year-old line of ultrafeminine evening clothes. Around Chapman, who is very pretty and pleasant, Weinstein likes to joke that he’s “fashionably challenged.” Despite his denials, everyone seems to know that he’s had a lot to do with Craig and Chapman’s success, particularly in getting Marchesa worn by the right people.
He didn’t like it when I wrote in a profile of Anna Wintour, last February, that Vogue seemed to be favoring Marchesa. “You whacked my girlfriend,” Weinstein said to me in July. He was smiling. I recognized the seduction. Everything is primal with Weinstein. Even his spats have an epic quality. He said, referring to the movie business, “When I concentrate on something, I’m really good and you’ll see it.” This is not Weinstein, a producer of such bankable films as “The English Patient” and “Shakespeare in Love,” being disingenuous, but Weinstein having to perpetually triumph as the underdog.
Weinstein is adamant that the spotlight should shine on Halston, in particular his partner Tamara Mellon, the founder of Jimmy Choo. It was Mellon, the onetime London “It” girl, who had the idea to buy Halston, first telling her friend, the Hollywood stylist Rachel Zoe, in December 2005. As Mellon told me, “The commercial business has obviously been damaged, but the name is still one of the most prestigious in the world.” She felt the previous owners had not sufficiently understood Halston’s legacy. She shared her ideas with Weinstein, who through his contacts (the retail eminence Marvin Traub, it turned out) found a private-equity firm to close the deal with Halston’s owner, James Ammeen, who had held the brand since 1999 (and who will stay with the company as a board member). Ammeen, who whittled Halston down to two eyewear licenses and a small custom line for Bergdorf Goodman, probably never saw revenues anywhere close to the estimated $22 million purchase price.
Indeed, in the view of Jamie Salter, the chief executive of Hilco Consumer Capital, which put up most of the money, Halston was a sleeper.
The price reflected the label’s untapped potential. “If you had run a proper auction, the brand would have gone over $100 million,” he said.
That may be, but what makes this transaction different from any other private-equity deal consuming the fashion industry is that it involves Harvey Weinstein. No one doubts that Mellon, because of her experience and connections, is equipped to do the job. She is one of the most successful businesswomen in Britain and recently sold Jimmy Choo for nearly $370 million. Zoe, who is on Halston’s creative advisory team, is a stylist for actresses like Cameron Diaz and Anne Hathaway and knows firsthand how the red carpet agitates demand for a look. Marco Zanini, a former Versace assistant, has been hired as creative director to give Halston a new vitality.
But what qualifies Weinstein?
To be sure, some of his ideas verge on schmaltz. Yet he’s in a position to create a fusion between fashion and entertainment that may ultimately redefine how clothes are marketed and possibly even designed. Despite reported difficulties, Weinstein insists that his movies have never been more profitable, citing box-office figures for “1408” and “Sicko.” Still, the audiences for movies have changed. Two years ago, when the Weinsteins left Disney to start a new company, one of the first people that Harvey called was Bernard Arnault. In the ’90s, Arnault, who began his career in construction, presided over the reordering of the fashion world from an insular place of small, elegant houses to one of megabrands that primed the era’s obsession with models, glitz, gossip and shopping. Between 1995 and 2005, revenues from LVMH fashion and leather goods soared from $1.5 billion to $6 billion.
Whether or not the new owners of Halston can capture the inventiveness of its founders, the fashion industry, for now, is much less preoccupied with breaking design conventions. For Weinstein, whose financial interests sprawl across movies, restaurants, book publishing, cable television and the Internet community aSmallWorld, the beauty of the Halston deal is that it provides him with another way to tap into the culture’s obsessions, and at relatively low risk.
“I want to bet on things,” Weinstein told me. Fashion insiders are right to regard him with surprise and suspicion. The worst that could happen is he’ll up the ante for everyone.
After running into Weinstein in Rome and Paris, I met him one afternoon in mid-July in his TriBeCa offices. Not eager to discourage the idea that he’s “fashionably challenged,” which was Chapman’s tag for him, he had on a dark suit and a white shirt with the tails flapping out. He was drinking a Coke.
Although Weinstein says he’ll defer creative decisions to Mellon (“The idea is to keep her happy and satisfied, and we will”), he seems exhilarated by the marketing potential. He’d like to make a documentary of Halston’s life.
Considering that almost no one has been able to capture the real experience of the fashion world, including Weinstein, who executive produced the Robert Altman film “Pret-à-Porter,” this has to be an incredibly tempting idea. (Indeed, at the moment, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Whitney Sudler-Smith is working on a Halston documentary of his own, and there’s been interest in making feature films based on Steven Gaines’s 1991 biography, “Simply Halston.”)
But Weinstein says he wants to make a movie that focuses on Halston’s creativity, rather than his celebrity. “Look at all the movies we’ve done about the creative process,” he says. “ ‘Shakespeare in Love.’ We did Frida Kahlo, even though Julie Taymor and I almost killed each other. I’m fascinated by the creative process.”
In the Weinstein Company’s production of “The Nanny Diaries” — starring Scarlett Johannson, the “face” of Louis Vuitton — Arnault’s fashion capital comes into even sharper focus as Johannson’s employer, Laura Linney, shows off her LVMH gear. It’s this kind of synergy that Weinstein is after.
“With the content that we do, there’s no reason you can’t have somebody walk into an airport with luggage that’s by Halston,” he says. “He did amazing luggage. There’s no point hiring another designer to do luggage — just take his luggage. Don’t mess with the formula. It’s Coca-Cola, some of the stuff he did.”
He goes on. “I’m in business with Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella. As we speak, we’re in Botswana filming the wildly fashionable ‘No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.’ It’s a very famous book, about a woman in her late 30s who decides to become a detective. She’s the Raymond Chandler of Botswana, only it’s hilarious.” The implication being that, in the right film, Halston could have a huge impact.
“Halston has to be thought of the way Gucci is, or Tom Ford,” Weinstein says. “It’s got to signify a certain coolness, Studio 54, a young American designer going against the grain.” He believes that’s where Halston’s many successors went wrong. “They were clothes for a dying breed,” he says.
“You didn’t think, Wow, I could see Cameron Diaz wearing that. You could see Cameron Diaz’s mother wearing Halston.”
It doesn’t bother Weinstein that he’s a fashion naif. I doubt it even enters his consciousness.
At one point he tells me he suggested to the other members of the board that they should reissue designs from the ’70s, sort of the best of Halston.
This is not a novel concept — Balenciaga, for one, has a special line of archive pieces — but Weinstein seemed to hear eureka.
“I’m talking about the actual Halstons,” he says earnestly.
I laugh. “It’s sacrilege, Harvey.”
“It’s fantastic,” he says, beaming.
“I’m joking, Harvey.”
In a 2002 profile in The New Yorker, Ken Auletta wrote: “Harvey Weinstein, as part of the larger, richer Miramax, appreciated his own power, and at the same time he denied that he had it.” There is a corollary, I think, in the way Weinstein downplays his involvement in Marchesa. He insists that he doesn’t use his influence to get actresses to wear the clothes, though he says he did bring Chapman to the attention of a Hollywood publicist, who got her client, Renée Zellweger, to wear a dress. Still, you have to ask: What would prevent Weinstein from immersing himself in this business when he’s done it for years in the work of filmmakers — so much so, Auletta wrote, that he’s been called Harvey Scissorhands? More to the point, why would this practice strike anyone as shameless when a lot of fashion and jewelry companies now pay actresses to wear their stuff, and some even spell out the terms ($30,000 for a bracelet and so forth) on a rate card?
Weinstein certainly knows how to lean on a publicist, but that’s not how he’s helped Chapman and Craig. According to Robert Burke, a retail consultant whom Weinstein hired two years ago, it was Weinstein who insisted that the designers create a second-tier line at the same time that they were launching Marchesa, rather than wait to see if there was traffic.
“It was probably the smartest thing they did,” Burke said. “But it was untraditional.”
Another time-honored tradition that Weinstein challenged was the spree of knocked-off dresses post-awards shows. After seeing images of copies by Allen Schwartz, including one of a Marchesa worn by Felicity Huffman, Weinstein had the litigator David Boies send Schwartz a letter. Weinstein told me, “It said, ‘Do this and I’ll go to court for 300 years if I have to. I don’t care if it cost me $10 million, you’re not going to knock off that dress.’ ”
He added, “The industry has to enforce this.”
Jamie Salter told me he, too, thought Weinstein was instrumental in Marchesa’s success. “I looked at Marchesa and how fast he jumped it,” Salter said. “He’s just a practical thinker. He says, ‘Why not?’ He just goes and challenges how things are done. People don’t have a response, and it’s because he’s right.”
Just as with his movies, Harvey Weinstein may not know any other way to get what he wants for Halston than his own way.
