The forgotten story of fashion designer Halston, and the filmmaker who’s retold it
- He dressed Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger, and was a regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory and Studio 54, but lost control of his fashion brand
- French-Chinese documentary maker Frédéric Tcheng was drawn to ‘the awfulness of a corporation crushing this man’, and then to the mystery of who Halston was
Frédéric Tcheng always knew he wanted to be in film, having discovered cinema through the works of luminaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese.
But owing to a French education system that, he says, “puts people on [career] tracks very early in their education”, the science student born and raised in Lyons, France’s third largest city, had to graduate in engineering before taking off for Paris, where he took his first steps in the film industry, working odd jobs.
It took a move to New York and Columbia University’s film school for the descendant of a Chinese imperial administrator’s family to reinvent himself. “It was great because they didn’t really care as much about my background, but about what I was presenting.”
This fan of filmmakers David Fincher, Todd Haynes and Olivier Assayas was more interested in fiction than documentary, until he started working on a film about Valentino, first as a PA then in different roles.
“I got along with the director, who gave me more and more responsibility. That’s how I discovered documentary and fashion.”
