“Halston” — the new five-part Netflix series from “American Horror Story” producer Ryan Murphy — charts the spectacular rise and fall of the disco-era designer, born Roy Halston Frowick. There’s plenty of sex and drugs and fashion, yet the most electrifying sequence in the show (out Friday) comes when Halston (Ewan McGregor) offers to dress his new acquaintance, Liza Minnelli (Krysta Rodriguez).

“Halston and Liza meet each other, and he just starts draping fabric on her body,” Rodriguez told Vogue about the scene. With a few elegant movements, Halston — who hasn’t yet established his own label or even style signature at this point — transforms from society hat maker to creative fashion genius, and Liza from a still-scrappy Broadway singer to bona fide star.

“Ewan went through intense training to figure out how the draping process works, and it resulted in the best dress that I’ve ever seen on my body,” Rodriguez said. “And it just came out of a single bolt of fabric and a couple pins!”

In real life, Minnelli’s godmother, Kay Thompson (author of the “Eloise” books), introduced the Broadway singer to Halston — who was already an established couturier — at his boutique in the early 1970s. But the designer really did coax sinuous, glamorous gowns out of a piece of cloth, like magic. And he really did have an intense creative connection with his friends and muses, particularly with Minnelli.

You can see the rest of my piece, about how Halston’s friendships with women (famously dubbed the Halstonettes) shaped his life and designs, for the New York Post here. This aspect of Halston — as well as his celebrity and glamour — remind me of Yves Saint Laurent, whose muses (Loulou de la Falaise, Betty Catroux) exuded a similar kind of confident, sexy energy as Halston’s. So, I reached out to the Museum at FIT’s Patricia Mears, who co-curated an excellent exhibit about Halston and YSL some years back. We had a great conversation, and I wanted to share some of the insights she had that didn’t make it into the piece. Here’s a bit here.

Raquel Laneri: Tell me about the Halstonettes.

Patricia Mears: The Halstonettes were just a remarkable phenomenon. It was not the first time that a major designer had this sort of cabine of models following him around. Paul Poiret was very famous for this, he would go to the races and this sort of phalanx of women following him in his latest designs.

But I think Halston did something more interesting; [the Halstonettes] were really integrated into his life. … And they were moving around as a group.

It was a very smart business decision — I mean, what’s better than having a gaggle of glamorous women around you, showing off your greatest designs? And I also think it helped the process, there was a lot of direct communication between him and these models, especially in the earlier years. It was not like working with a client, who leads a very different and separate life. They were really friends. Being a curator I really wonder whether being around these women did help influence how Halston approached design.

It does seem so, even from just hearing how he worked, how he would drape directly on the woman in this intimate way.

It's the part of Halston's life that people don't really concentrate on, and it's really for me the most interesting thing. Because he started off as a hat maker and a very good one. And building a hat is a very physically demanding process. It's also an intimate process because you're so physically close to the client. But you're basically making dimensional sculptures. Yeah, some hats had a little bit of flexibility or movement in them, but by and large you're talking about creating a skull cap of some sort that will sit and meant to be immobile and really be sort of a frame for the women’s face.

Halston made this quantum leap from milliner to dressmaker — and not just making women's clothes but soft, diaphanous, body-caressing, kinetic clothing. [It was] very different from the way that somebody like Charles James made them. Charles James went from hat maker to couturier, and his clothes were constructed like a hat, sometimes torturously so: very heavy, rigid and completely inflexible. I remember one of James's clients telling me that she went to a party and she couldn’t sit down the whole evening. And that was completely the opposite [of what Halston did].

For him to take this artisanal leap I think really demonstrates that he was really a coutuerier in the traditional and best sense of the word. And I don't think we focus on that. He had this magic in his hands — I have heard that he could just drape and pin a couple of things and he knew how to control the fabric.

But Ralph Rucci told me something else that I had never heard: that Halston would unfurl fabric on the ground and would cut into it. So it's like a sculpture but he's doing it very softly. So the only connection between the milliner vs the couturier is the fact that he worked with his hands. And this is something that we do not want to concentrate on. You know he’s so glamorous, the rise and fall the great American story — or the great American tragedy depending on how you look at it. I think [his skill] gets lost in this.

His runways were very diverse, too.

It's such an irony, you know, we're seeing things like Black lives Matter today — finally! — but this period of the ‘60s into ‘70s was remarkably open [in terms of diversity]. This is the first time we really have a generation of Black designers whose names we recognize: Willie Smith, Stephen Burrows. And at the same time the Dance Theatre of Harlem comes along. We now see an entire company of Black women dancing, and at the same time [these] women are breaking into the modeling industry. And it was very fortuitous because some of Halston's early shows were done with music: the models were not just stiff walking up and down with a little card in their hand the way they traditionally did in couture shows, they now became real shows, and if you're gonna do that you need people who can move. So it was the right time … and Halston benefitted from this.