T Magazine: The Young London Design Star to Watch
The young New York designer Michael Halpern remembers the precise moment he realized he wanted to go into fashion: when he saw a black and white photograph from the late 1960s, of his mother staring into the middle distance in a dark jumpsuit, her eyebrows bleached, an expression of insouciant cool on her face. “That image is incredibly important to me,” Halpern says. “It’s more than the clothes but it’s her attitude. For me, that was the start of it.”
The picture hangs alongside those of Bianca Jagger, Linda Evangelista and Cher (in a sequined Bob Mackie number) on a mood board in Halpern’s matchbox-size East London studio. “It’s not just what they looked like,” says Halpern, 29, who, in contrast with his sequined goddesses, is dressed entirely in black. “But there was such grace, confidence and poise.” After all, a woman would need all those qualities in spades to pull off Halpern’s after-dark aesthetic — a high-wire balancing act between disco glitz and couture-grade finish. His standout Central Saint Martins MA show last year won him his dream job designing couture for Atelier Versace as a consultant; he already counts Beyoncé as a fan; he has an impressive list of stockists, including Bergdorfs and matchesfashion.com; and he’s accomplished all this before he’s even staged his first official show, which will take place this weekend in London.
Halpern was born in upstate New York. His father was a nuclear mechanical engineer and his mother a bank teller. He remembers his mother and her friends telling him about dancing at Studio 54 or at the bar at the St. Regis Hotel. Those stories inspired his ongoing love affair with the hedonism of the ’70s. “There were less constraints and oppression back then,” he says. “It wasn’t so correct.” After graduating with a women’s wear degree from Parsons in 2010, Halpern went on to hold design jobs at both J. Mendel and Oscar de la Renta, where he honed classical skills of plissé, draping and hand-pleating. But it wasn’t until he moved to London to do an MA at Central Saint Martins that he learned to embrace his love of both “trash,” as he calls it, and elegance.
That dichotomy was in evidence in his MA collection, which was inspired by the “glamour and showmanship” of horse diving: Models came down the runway looking like glamorous creatures of the night in sequined polo necks worn over flares and satin bustier-and-miniskirt combos with asymmetrical trains. The collection was a study of contrasts — with Halpern sourcing “horrific, disgusting” fabrics from Shepherd’s Bush and Walthamstow markets and elevating them by pairing them with delicately hand-sewn paillettes and luxurious silks and satins. Despite his technical skill, Halpern revels in imperfections in his work: seams that overlap, paillettes that don’t quite match, a corset with exposed darts in the lining. “If it’s too pristine and too perfect — it’s not believable,” he says. “I like having everything a bit off and moved — it makes it cooler. I want you to be able to move and breathe in my clothes but still feel glam.”
The collection caught the eye of Sarah Mower, chief fashion critic for U.S. Vogue and the British Fashion Council’s Ambassador for Emerging Talent, who introduced Halpern to Donatella Versace. The designer recruited Halpern to work for Atelier Versace, her couture division, only a few days after he graduated from the MA. “When I saw Michael’s work, I immediately picked up the phone to get in touch with him,” Versace told T. “I never saw anything like it before. His sense of color is brilliant; his craftsmanship is incredible.” The admiration was mutual: “I’ve loved Versace for so long,” Halpern says. “She’s incredible and has a point of view. She lives the brand and knows exactly who Versace is. It’s really exciting to see someone like that work.”
With star collaborators (the stylist Patti Wilson and the hairstylist Sam McKnight) on hand for his debut showing this weekend, expectations are high, but Mower is confident that he will remain grounded in the process. “It is alarming that a star can be born before he even has his first selling collection on a runway in these insta-times, but I am very hopeful Michael’s character means he will be able to go slowly and size his business the way he wants it to be,” she says. Gone are the “horrific fabrics” from the markets in his MA collection — replaced by more recognizably luxe materials like tulle, organza and duchesse satin. His two seasons working at Atelier Versace have also translated into an increased sense of refinement in his own work. “You learn techniques and see things being done there that don’t exist elsewhere,” he says. Perhaps most of all, he is seeking to return to a spirit of loucheness and decadence of the disco years. He would love it if fashion could return to a more innocent, joyful time; he recalls watching a Christian Lacroix show in his teenage years “where the models would be smoking, smiling, laughing. It was so exciting and so pure in a way. That escapism is important in really dark times.”
