Halpern (Q4221)
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Halpern is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Halpern |
Halpern is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
As the American-born Michael Halpern explained prior to this collection’s presentation, the majority of it was quite precisely defined by the childhood influence of his mother, Cheryl, who was at today’s show in the courtyard of the imperiously grandiose Royal Exchange building. Cheryl and Michael’s father (who was by her side today) moved from the Bronx to Niskayuna in upstate New York when the designer was a young boy. Yet while you could take Cheryl out of New York City, recounted her son, the city was indelibly established in Cheryl’s dress sense. As he explained: “She did not want to change her wardrobe to a country-style wardrobe even if she’d started living in the middle of nowhere. So she would have these dinners with her friends, and my dad and she would be wearing these wild leopard-print caftans and gowns that were completely unconventional for upstate New York.”Thus the velvet leopard print and the deconstructed starburst-tone leopard jacquard with which Halpern rendered several of his typically dramatic evening looks. The blue and black velvets flocked with golden astronomical renderings were rememberings of the neon plastic stars with which he decorated his room in Niskayuna. Clusters of golden panels at the shoulders of a black dress were shaped after the pattern that Cheryl would doodle while on work calls with her banking firm in the city. And the balloon-explosion, multicolored frill dresses that closed this main part of the collection recalled a precise piece of Cheryl’s that Halpern remembered literally climbing through as a child.The super-oversized earrings, some suspended black lacquer picture frames, others in golden (but not gold) leaves that threatened to collide with the eye of the wearer as they swung against her walk, were there to “bring some lightness to the collection when the clothes are so rooted in construction,” said Halpern. His calling as a couturier was evident in that construction and drape, but couture is no easy—or cheap—arena to establish yourself in. Hence, one suspects, the look 26–onward section that was designed as a collaborative project with Barbie. It was okay (although the Farah Fawcett wigs were a little much), but rather jarred against what had come before. Still, a young designer’s gotta do what a young designer’s gotta do. Props to this Niskayuna lad, plus Cheryl and his dad.
18 September 2022
When designers brought their collections to England in the heyday of haute couture, they would take them to places like Blenheim Palace. In the post-pandemic age, Brixton Recreation Centre is where it’s at. “The community vibe is still really important for me,” said Michael Halpern during a preview. “Going forward, there will continue to be elements that have more of a social aspect and make it more exciting for me. It’s not just about the clothes anymore.” While his work isn’t haute couture, 25% of his eveningwear-centric business is now bespoke. As was about half of this season’s collection.But after the socially conscious films he produced during the pandemic—lending his platform to the heroines of the frontline and the compromised performance arts—Halpern said he can no longer simply stage a runway show for the sake of 15 minutes of glamour. He chose the Brixton Recreation Centre as his venue not only because it stands for the community spirit that’s now key to his brand values, but because the Borough of Lambeth can’t afford to install power in the particular space he showed in, and he saw he could do it for his show and leave it to the center for future use, free of charge.It’s the kind of gesture that must make a mother proud. Halpern has a particularly fabulous one back in Upstate New York, who raised him on Old Hollywood movies, which he spent the lockdown periods re-watching with adult eyes. When he got toMadam Satan—Cecil B. DeMille’s bonkers extravaganza from 1930 about a party aboard an airship—he recognized its early influence on his creative disposition. As for how he came up with the rest of the collection’s premise…“Imagine if Angelica Houston had a deep two-year sleep during Covid and she woke up and found herself in the 1970s party version ofMadam Satanwith Katherine DeMille,” he said, referring to the director’s illustrious daughter, who has a role in the movie. The narrative cut quite the contrast to the show’s surroundings, which painted a rather ironic picture of Fashion Week’s post-pandemic return. The world isn’t quite the same but there are still plenty of sequins to go around.True to form, the Halpern collection used its fair share of those, but this season the designer went much deeper into his research of other materials which might conjure a similar effect.
The looks created in ivory and gold tiger-motif velvet burnout crinkled chiffon (yes, that’s one material) that opened the show had a three-dimensionality to their fabrication. Halpern’s brick fringing—a kind of Mondrian-esque way of layering fringing—created mesmerizing movement, and the leopard jacquard emerald he used in adornments like a huge ruffle cascading down the side of a sequined pencil skirt looked like it had a life of its own.Throughout the collection, he inserted more minimal suggestions into his running order as realistic—and perhaps accessible—alternatives to the grandeur. It was a kind of reduction process that materialized in cream scuba dresses with gold-bauble adornments, or the draped white crinkled chiffon dresses that culminated in a nymph-like bridal gown with a veil and a crystal crown. If Halpern was making a move on the wedding dress market, it would be a wise one.Like the social causes that underpin the brand, Halpern’s garments are no follies. In his short career, season by season he has strategically constructed his business by listening to the demands of the wealthy women who buy his bespoke dresses, and the retailers who sell the more accessible versions of those same ideas. And his clients aren’t just socialites. After our preview he was taking a call with one of the biggest superstars in the world, but making me swear to secrecy.
19 February 2022
During his childhood summers in upstate New York, Michael Halpern religiously visited the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, where New York City Ballet would relocate for rehearsals and test runs. “It was very informal, so you were allowed to go backstage to look at the costumes and meet the dancers,” he recalled during the filming of his collection in the Royal Opera House, a docu-style spectacular featuring the stars of its ballet company: Fumi Kaneko, Sumina Sasaki, Marianna Tsembenhoi, Leticia Dias, Katharina Nikelski, Céline Gittens, Sae Maeda, and the danseur Marcelino Sambé. “My mom has this funny story—I don’t know if it’s true or not—where I would go under the tutus and see how they were made,” he said, slightly blushing.Destiny: fulfilled. After months of talks, Halpern was able to stage a rare collaboration with the ballet and purpose-make a collection for it. The film assumed a similar format to last year’s tribute to the frontline workers of the pandemic: real people’s real stories of how the crisis affected them personally and professionally. This season Halpern wanted to highlight the fate of the performing arts, which—as far as culture goes—have been hit the hardest by the lockdowns. “They had to set up sprung floors and ballet bars in their homes, so that [the] moment the restrictions lifted they would be ready to go onstage,” he said. Those stages, of course, would be the last institutions to reopen.This October the elite dancers finally get their audiences back when they return inRomeo and Juliet. Watching these super-talents flex their muscles from the balcony of the Royal Opera House during filming, you realize they’re really pro athletes in costume. Except, on this occasion, the clothes were the real deal, a mix of ready-to-wear and couture-level pieces that will be made to order. “I wanted to develop techniques that would challenge my team and me as a studio, and the type of craft we have,” said Halpern, noting how he’d sewn and embellished a number of the elements with his very own hands for days on end. He can’t help himself.Halpern’s bespoke business is big. While his devotion to opulence and savoir faire may seem foreign to some at this moment in time, he’s adored by rich women with post-pandemic parties to go to.
It’s why—next to the signature sequined suiting, jumpsuits, and column dresses he offers the shop floors—this collection was characterized by painstaking craftsmanship: a transparent orb dress latticed in Swarovski crystals and filled with multicolored feathers; dresses “brick fringed” in color-blocked strings by hand; and what his stylist, Patti Wilson, referred to as “the parfait”: a cocoon dress with a pink satin bow whipped up in a cloud of kaleidoscopic plume.If those numbers don’t sound very dance-friendly, that was part of the exercise. Halpern wanted to explore how body-conscious or confining garments like, say, a vegan leather bondage dress laced up through grommets, change in motion. He asked himself: How does a ballerina adapt her moves to restriction? After 18 months confined to their domestic training camps, it was familiar territory to these dancers, at least figuratively.Within that study—and the technical challenges he set himself—this collection continued to conquer the demi-couture sector of fashion that Halpern is carving out for himself and feed his industrial output with enough ideas to keep that side of his business occupied all the same. “The reason I make this type of clothing is for fantasy and escapism and, you know, truly feeling euphoric. And that’s what I think ballet is for. It really takes you away for a moment, and that’s what we try to do too,” he said. “Putting those two things together, for me, just felt like so much synergy.”
17 September 2021
After months of retail tumbleweeds, Christmas came early for Michael Halpern. “Just before December, when the new collection went into stores, it picked up and sold out. I don’t know who’s wearing it or where they’re going, but it shows a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel,” the designer said on a video call from his Vauxhall studio. The hope it gave him fueled a fall collection uplifted by feelings of emergence: “what people are going to wear when they come out of lockdown.”Last year, Halpern devoted himself and his brand to pandemic relief efforts. He spent the summer producing PPE in a makeshift factory, and dedicated September’s collection to the front line, dressing its heroines in demi-couture for a digital docu-show that made more than a few viewers cry. Those clothes were high-octane socialist realist escapism—if that isn’t a total oxymoron—made not to wear, but to inspire. Now, Halpern said, the time has come for realizing those dreams.Imagining how we’ll want to dress in August, when a moderate dance party might be an option, he looked to the unconstricted clubwear of the 1970s and ’80s: catsuits, jumpsuits, and things that felt like something you might wear to a club night on a yacht, a real bathing suit with a matching leopard sarong very much included. “I watched an old interview with Meryl Streep, who said she liked to dance in a catsuit because ‘nothing gets in the way.’ She made it sound so…functional,” he smiled.Halpern’s idea of the emergent wardrobe wasn’t without irony. The extravagant sequins, graphic intarsia patterns, diamanté brassieres, and draped scarlet satin-silk trains that embodied this collection—and, generally, his mind— weren’t his proposal for a post-pandemic day look. But they weren’t follies, either. “You want to feel like you’re putting on clothing again. You want it to feel different than normal,” said Halpern. “It’s not some chiffon thing you waft around in at home, but something you go out in.”Just don’t mention theCword. “I’m so sick of comfortwear,” he said. “Everyone I’ve spoken to is so tired of what they’re wearing now: simple, comfortable…,” Halpern said, tasting those adjectives. “That Champagne is burned!” he said, laughing and quotingDynasty’s Dominique Deveraux. “I wanted to do tailoring that’s not ‘luxe home tailoring,’ but real tailoring, in sequins and duchesse. It’s about being ostentatious, but not feeling cumbersome. It has to feel easy.
”Unlike last season’s emotional film, he presented the collection as a simple photo shoot. Said Halpern: “It felt appropriate. In September we weren’t in lockdown. This time we are.” It was a fitting sentiment for his approach to this moment in time. While he doesn’t deny that the glamour of what he does is far from our current reality, he’s put those sequins to work for a good cause. Now, as we cross our fingers for a gradual return to the life that Halpern sells clothes for, he tries to adapt his industrial output in a pragmatic way.“You’re worried if your business is going to continue on the path that it was,” he said, reflecting on the past year. “After a time of not selling high glamour during lockdown, for people to be buying it again feels like all our work over this past year paid off. I wanted to keep making beautiful things, not in a trivial way, but in an earnest and sincere way. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly, but to see it moving again is beyond words for me.”
23 February 2021
When Donald Trump won the election in 2016, Michael Halpern was in Milan working on a Versace couture collection. “I went into work hysterically crying. Everyone was very understanding,” he recalled in a preview for his new collection. Halpern is an ultra-liberal New Yorker in Europe, and Donatella Versace had immediately offered him a job after he graduated from Central Saint Martins that summer. But suddenly, the world of opportunity seemed a lot less bright. He founded his eponymous brand a year later as a direct response to the reactionary waves hitting the political landscape. It was, and remains, about defiant glamour, a call for diversity, individuality, and nonconformity.“We needed joy and fantasy and escapism, and that’s truer today than it ever was, with all the horrible things that are happening in the U.S.,” he said. “This isn’t me turning a blind eye to those things. It’s a response.” So was the collection he created in reflection of the events of 2020. After spending the spring volunteering in a makeshift PPE factory in London, Halpern decided to devote his platform to the heroines “who put their lives on the line for us every day.” He cast eight women—from a train operator and a hospital cleaner to a nurse and an OBGYN—designed bespoke looks for them, and captured their stories in a short film released alongside a look book that features the full collection.“Doing bespoke is something I really love. Generally, the women who are buying bespoke clothing are not sample size, so I’m very used to making clothes in all different sizes,” he said, surrounded by rails of plume and sequins in the plush manor house suite at the Rosewood Hotel, where his press appointments took place. For Halpern, this season’s project confirmed his belief in body-positive and age-embracing fashion. Foregoing themes, he freely created each look to fit the women’s personalities. The result was a bonkers display of couture-like silhouettes, which look too couture to put into production, but aren’t (feathered orb dresses excluded). “We work towards what’s most flattering for most body types,” he pointed out.Suspended somewhere between the 1930s and ’70s, the louche pajamas, housecoats with trains, and ladylike tweed suits Halpern sent through his kaleidoscopic machine of jacquard, animal prints, and marabou may not have conjured immediate images of activism. But this designer, 32, belongs to a generation who understands that influence comes in many forms.
When he is heavily featured on theReal Housewivesreunion shows (his favorites are Camille Grammer and Erika Jayne), he knows it might lead to a bigger audience for a message like the one carried by this season’s film. He does, however, draw the line at certain clients. “Melania has not worn anything. And I would not…” he paused, exuding a state of shock. “No, none of the Trumps have been in Halpern.”
18 September 2020
Michael Halpern is applying for his British residency visa, so it seemed a bit of a hint to the establishment that he’d booked the Old Bailey, one of the highest chambers of justice in the land, for his fall show. Anyway, the marble lobby made an imposing backdrop for a salute to British society fashion as seen through a New Yorker’s eyes. “Now that I’m going to make the U.K. my permanent home, I thought it was time to pay homage to British society women, and to designers like Ossie Clark, Bill Gibb, and Zandra Rhodes—to celebrate the bourgeoisie and the rebel,” said Halpern.Well, Halpern doesn’t really need to take an excursion into history to justify a trip around ’70s glamour, or thereabouts. He’s been designing with good-time glam in mind ever since he graduated from Central Saint Martins MA with his sequined disco-flare collection in 2016—the same year that produced Richard Quinn; both of them set on defying the gloom times of the Trump election and Brexit referendum from the start.It was Adwoa Aboah, today’s quintessential London Notting Hill, who led out Halpern’s imaginary salute to the kind of dressing that haute hippies and English aristocrats got up to behind closed doors. He let “color, fun, fantasy, optimism” be his guide, starting with Aboah’s emerald green burnout velvet gown, flowing out extravagantly from a gold 3D flower-embroidered collar. There were hugely voluminous bubble gowns that certain duchess dowagers (a class of eccentric lady never unafraid of color) might have worn to country house balls, and one or two caftans that Princess Margaret might perhaps have swished around in on holiday on Mustique.But in a way, it’s not fantasy at all—in the space of three short years, Halpern has made his business a reality that sells all over America and the Middle East. This collection circled back to include more iterations of the super-flares and all-sequin multicolored jumpsuits that made his name—timely, when the ’70 are hitting a trend spike again. Aficionados might recognize that the green leather suit was a nod to Clark’s penchant for snakeskin tailoring in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The denim suit—Halpern’s first to qualify as daywear—also fit the silhouette women think of when they bring his name to mind. In fact, it’s the beginning of a soon-to-be-launched collaboration with J Brand—exciting for the designer, and for young women who want a slice of the ’70s action to take to the streets.
15 February 2020
To walk into the Michael Halpern show was to be staggered by the sight of two vast turn-of-the-century chandeliers which had been lowered to the floor level of a grand institutional ballroom in Westminster. That glittering backdrop—perfect for London’s king of sequins—was all the native New Yorker could desire for a collection that was an homage to Barbra Streisand and the Ziegfeld Follies.“I love Barbra Streisand. She’s so magnificent. Her talent and charisma and gumption!” Halpern exclaimed. Back in his studio, he’d plastered his walls with clippings of Streisand in her Academy Award–winning role in 1968’sFunny Girl, in which she plays Fanny Brice, the ugly duckling turned Ziegfeld star. “They talk about Henry Street in the movie—my grandfather was a tailor from there, in the Lower East Side. So this collection started with that—and then everything Barbra wore in her life in the ’70s and ’80s.”Disco Ziegfeld, fed through Halpern’s vision of old-school Oscars glamour, then: material to set him off on a collection of liquid gold lamé bubbles, floor-sweeping glitter trains, and bedazzled flared pantsuits. Halpern stands out in London as a young designer who seriously specializes in non-ironic full-on eveningwear—he’s found his market in the United States, the Middle East, and anywhere there are women who will go all-out in the glamour stakes. What he has going for him is a widening repertoire of shapes which give an equal share of options across generations and body types. It’s not just corseted tops and disco flares anymore; now, there are generous volumes, capes, and a showstopper which was created from masses of micro-pleaded animal-print chiffon.
14 September 2019
Michael Halpern, London’s resident New Yorker, was the first of his young generation to make a break for glam—taking the risk of going for full glitter-disco escapism (inspired by his mom’s Studio 54 days) as a reaction against the gathering political gloom. Americans immediately recognized him as one of their own—his clothes have been populating upscale wardrobes since he graduated Central Saint Martins MA in the class of 2016.Now that exaggerated glamour is an actual movement, Halpern took license to push it to a new level, leading his audience to the Deco ballroom of a Park Lane hotel, and immersing them in an extravagance of Erté-inspired drama. “My parents had books of illustrations by Erté at home, which I pored over at a child. He did all these incredible drawings of sinuous, serpentlike women and images that went from flowers into animals, to you didn’t know what,” Halpern recalled. “So I just started draping . . . .”For those who’d wondered if Halpern could go beyond his hit signature sequined ’70s flares and corsets (which have been much-copied), this was his answer: voluminous hooded opera coats, richly beaded floor-length halters with crystal chokers, lamé tissue Deco prints cut on the bias, a gold and black embroidered ’20s pajama suit. Yes, there was no neglect of sequins either—but this time he’d converted his glam suit into a new silver two-piece of an off-the-shoulder waterfall top with matching trousers, and added a series of simpler short dresses, the best being a rose pink dégradé sleeveless trapeze with an asymmetrically sliced skirt.Well timed for the Oscars, the variety in this glitter mine of Halpern’s should have stylists dialing London right now.
16 February 2019
Right out of the starting block of Central Saint Martins’s MA class of 2016, Michael Halpern served a glam redux of disco sequins which shook the fashion world, all the way up to the selling floor of Bergdorf Goodman. It was only two years ago in real time—as opposed to the eons in fashion which appear to have elapsed since then—but it poses a dilemma for him. Should he carry on, owning the sequin, and exploding its possibilities, or strike out in new directions? His answer this season: try to do both.Spring 2019 retained some of Halpern’s ’70s-derived flares and corseted tops with a side drape—his signature, inspired by his mom’s tales of dancing at Studio 54. But he also went back further this time, thinking about the A-line mini-shifts of the ’60s, and about another member of his family—his mother’s mother, Esther. “She was very prim and proper, even though things got very short in the ’60s,” said Halpern. “It’s amazing to think of that phase, when the pill was happening, the sexual revolution. So this is an ode to the predecessors who set things up for my women of the ’70s.” Halpern’s ’60s references were more Rudi Gernreich than Mary Quant—he’s a New Yorker, not a Londoner, after all. He also said he’d been looking at caftans and sarongs—a hint of a Palm Beach influence, maybe.Some of it marked a step forward, like the section of deluxe gilded velvet tunics and trousers. The combinations with striped sequin rugby shirts—especially the one with a little wrap skirt—looked fresh and snappy, in the American sportswear sense. At times it stumbled, literally—some models couldn’t walk in the towering heels, and ended up barefoot on the runway.These things can happen to designers much more experienced than Halpern. As organized and professional as he is, he’d already presold plenty of the sequined disco-tastic pieces customers love and keep demanding. There are plenty of young women who also love showing their legs—they’ll likely identify with the minidresses next summer. But next season? It might be nice to see Halpern let go of the idea of showing in a raw space, and concentrating his thoughts on superdeluxe fantasy. There’s a demand for that kind of escapism.
15 September 2018
If sequins are scattered all over fashion in 2018—which they most certainly are—it’s down to the sudden, irradiating influence of one young American in London, Michael Halpern. So huge has his impact been on converting a corner of fashion-consciousness to disco-glam, that it’s hard to remember that he is only on his third collection since graduating exactly three years ago, in the Central Saint Martins MA class of 2016. Part of Halpern’s impetus has been his reaction to troubling times in his home country. “I said it at the beginning: My work is about escapism in a dark time. But since then, the news keeps getting so much worse. It’s a huge downward spiral. When I was designing this collection, Trump’s move to ban transgender people in the military was coming out. I thought,Holy shit!”So, still Halpern persists, this time angling his thoughts toward “inappropriate glamour”—in his mind, the idea of rebelliously breaking fashion rules, and wearing sequins during the day. An inspiration was the legend of Nan Kempner: “That time she was turned away from Le Cirque because she was wearing a Saint Laurent trouser suit—and so went away, took off the pants, and went in wearing the jacket as a dress.” In that class of proposal, there were several no-holds-barred drapey-shouldered jackets, worn with matching thigh-high Christian Louboutin boots, or tiny skirts, and one fierce steel gray corseted number with only underwear for coverage.Throwback ’80s power-woman style is in the air this season. Halpern’s pastiche haute couture bubble dresses read as belonging to that trend. But the acceleration of his fame has inevitably put him under stylistic pressure. When so many others are now churning out sequined super-flares at cheaper prices, should he change direction? So far, it’s only made him more determined to stick to his guns. “I see it, and I think,Why would this deter me?No. This is something I want to do. But I am now thinking about how to do high-octane glamour without using sequins.”The world will be watching, again, to see how that develops next time. Advice to all young designers with start-up businesses is to go step by step, building up a signature slowly by doing one thing well. In a completely different vein, that’s what Molly Goddard has also done, with her flouncy taffeta, tulle, and smocking. For Halpern, it’s a dilemma.
No one wants him to do an about-turn, but somehow he needs to craft an extra dimension for the women who’ve proved so willing to love what he does.
17 February 2018
“I’m not really quite sure I’ve seen this happen, straight out of the gate, for a designer who isn’t known,” said Linda Fargo of Bergdorf Goodman, leaning in to give Michael Halpern her feedback on the take-up of his first collection. The 30-year-old American designer in London, who had just stepped out of the wings after his Spring show, blinked and looked stunned. “Michael,” Fargo insisted, amused at his expression, “You have to know this is not normal!”In the age of social media, it’s true that the reputation of new designers and brands can take off at high speed, but selling through at Bergdorf Goodman in your first season? That is special. The widespread nature of the instant positive reaction to Michael Halpern’s first glittering ’70s disco-inspired collection can also be gauged by the fact that Ruth Chapman ofMatchesFashion.comthrew a dinner for him on the stage of the London Palladium last night. The theater, a famous central London entertainment landmark, is storied: both Judy Garland and the Beatles took the stage there in the early 1960s. Everyone, it seems, wants to celebrate the young designer discovery who is fighting gloom with his explosion of multicolored sequins.Halpern showed his sophomore collection in the red plush theater aisle. Under artificial light at night, Halpern’s clothes come alive. This time, he added more to his repertoire, introducing tailored pantsuits—one in a pale blue flowered brocade, the other a cheetah-print on gold. For the moment though, Halpern only needs to keep doing what he’s done for the past year—the disco super-flares, sparkly tunics, and corseted dresses—to keep women happy. And that is exactly what he did.
16 September 2017