Many of us know Halston as a creature of Studio 54, a designer of modern yet glamorous clothing that women from Liza Minnelli to Martha Graham could dance in. What many don’t know, however, is that Halston started as a milliner who made one of the most admired hats in history: the pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy wore in 1961 to her husband’s inauguration as president. From 1958 to 1968, Halston ran the custom millinery department at Bergdorf Goodman, where Diana Vreeland called him “an absolute magician with his hands.” It’s that fuller picture that Mister Halston, a new one-person play written by Raffaele Pacitti and executive-produced by Donna Karan, sets out to paint. The play opens in the spring of 1987, in Halston’s apartment on the Upper East Side, as a journalist arrives to interview him for a now famous New York Times profile. They discuss his meteoric rise, the people who shaped him, the cultural impact he had. Three years later, Halston died from complications of AIDS, at the age of 57. —Jeanne Malle