Karlie Kloss isn’t returning as the show’s full-time host after assuming that role in seasons 17 and 18. Scroll down to meet and learn a little about the lineup of new designers. Of course, there has been a pandemic since then, but the show goes on with a new roster of 16 up-and-coming designers from around the world competing to become the next big name in fashion and present a collection at New York Fashion Week. Hugo told Gaines, just a few years before his death:“Halston and I never had sex after the first three months.” In Hugo’s mind, “it was a great love affair - not about sex.” That level of depth and nuance is missing from Netflix’s Halston.“Project Runway” returns for its 19th season on October 14, almost two years after season 18 aired from December 2019 through March 2020. “Victor was brilliant, zany, exciting, and dangerous,” Gaines wrote in the 1991 Vanity Fair story that preceded his Halston biography. Even Gaines has granted Hugo some measure of humanity in the past. Who among us can’t relate, if only a little bit - maybe even a lot? But there was clearly more to Hugo than the third-hand descriptions that have rained down upon him in print. It seems tough to deny that Hugo was, in fact, a hot mess. In a story for The Cut surrounding the 2011 release of the documentary Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston, Amy Odell characterized Hugo, without citation, as “loathsome, drugged-out, and promiscuous,” saying he was “described by a former acquaintance as ‘the biggest mess.’” The designer’s niece, Lesley Frowick, told People in a feature about the 2019 doc Halston that her uncle “mostly tried to keep out of his life.” She added, “He tolerated him, but he was trouble.” That unflattering depiction of Hugo has had an unfortunate staying power. He was also supposed to be a window-dresser, but a child could have done what he did.” “Victor also ended up being ill and had no respect for anything,” Gaines told Musto.
That Hugo would come off as something close to a collage of stereotypes in a mesh tank top is perhaps no surprise given how Halston’s biographer portrayed him. A Black hustler, for example, first introduces Halston to poppers in an earlier episode. It’s a pattern that casts the designer as a passive receptor of bad influence from dark-skinned men. By the next episode, Haltson is hoovering up handfuls of coke daily, deep in the throes of addiction.
Then, when Halston turns down the offer of cocaine (“it’s not really my scene”), Hugo forces it under his nose - a bump that snowballs into an avalanche. On their first night together, Hugo balks at Halston’s domesticity, scoffing at the chicken he has roasting in the oven. Halston hires him as a hustler, just as the designer reportedly did with many other men.
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Hugo, who was born in Venezuela, reportedly assumed the name of the Les Misérables author for its obvious pun, describing himself as “Huge-o” below the belt.Īs played in the series by Gian Franco Rodriguez, Hugo is horny, volatile, and easily bored, with an accent that strains credulity. He had a big dick, like a baby salami,” Gaines said in a 2019 interview with entertainment journalist Michael Musto. “He pissed and came on canvases for Andy Warhol. Victor Hugo, with whom Halston had a tumultuous, on-again-off-again 10-year relationship before the designer’s death in 1990, had a reputation for being a wild personality, and claimed to be an artist in his own right. Indeed, Halston’s lovers were themselves captivating figures.
That would have required Murphy to consider them through fresh eyes, not Halston’s, and to surpass the perspective of biographer Steven Gaines on whose 1991 book, Simply Halston: The Untold Story, the series is based. It would be fine to show that objectification, up to a point, if the men Halston loved were given the space to be three-dimensional, too. Aside from Austin’s initial skepticism - and his accurate estimation of Halston as “a size queen” - the show treats the designer’s taste for big Black and brown dick as a simple character quirk, like his drapey design aesthetic and ceaseless chain smoking.