What seems a most unlikely fashion collaboration – but could prove a successful one – began with a simple telephone call. “Harvey just said, ‘What are you planning to do with your life for the next five years?’ ” says Tamara Mellon, the founder of Jimmy Choo, of her impromptu chat with the Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein. “I told him I was in love with the vintage Halston I had been buying obsessively in LA for the past few years, and that I longed to reestablish the label as a truly global brand.” She pauses. “He got it immediately.”

And that is how, on February 4, as part of New York fashion week, Halston, the iconic 1970s label, will be relaunched with much fanfare. Fashion loves bringing back names from the grave, as shown by the recent histories of Balenciaga, Lanvin and Dior, and if Mellon-Weinstein-Halston doesn’t seem the most obvious of fashion equations, Mellon – buoyed, no doubt, by her incredible success in repositioning Jimmy Choo as an international must-have brand – has no fears. “Halston will be what it was in the 1970s: a pure luxury brand,” she says, recalling the designer who dressed Jackie O, Lauren Bacall and Liza Minnelli in simple billowing pieces, encapsulating the languid glamour of 1970s New York and the jet-set lifestyle that centred on the infamous nightclub Studio 54. “His aesthetic was so strong that the whole DNA of the label works perfectly today. It’s all about easy, relaxed glamour and confidence.”

Confidence is, after all, something for which Mellon – and Weinstein, for that matter – are well known. “Harvey is on the board, and that adds huge value,” Mellon says, “but he won’t have day-to-day involvement.” It’s hard to see how Weinstein will avoid it: he has been widely involved in fashion matters since his wife, the British designer Georgina Chapman, launched her own successful label, Marchesa.

This is not the first attempt to revive Halston. Previous high-profile designers, including Randolph Duke, have all failed to reignite the spark. Thus, its new designer, Marco Zanini, fresh from Versace, where he has been head of couture for 10 years, faces the biggest challenge of his career. “Marco knows he must stay in the Halston aesthetic,” Mellon says firmly. “But the world of couture and private customers is one with which he is very familiar. His Versace experience will be invaluable, and his age [he is only 35] is just right.”

Sorted, then. Yet, despite the lineup, the third attempt to raise the Halston label since the designer died of Aids in 1990 may find recreating the mystique and keeping it going long enough problematic.

Sure, the new Halston collection will become a red-carpet fixture, especially with the backing of the movie mogul Weinstein. Another collaborator is the LA superstylist Rachel Zoe – so it will no doubt be featured in all the top magazines. The initial excitement will carry the label through its first couple of seasons, regardless of whether the clothes are any good. But Mellon and Weinstein know that real financial success will rest on sales of jeans, sunglasses and, above all, fragrances. The company’s signature perfume, confidently labelled Halston, was a huge success in the designer’s lifetime and funded many of his ventures. The main problem the new owners face is that the personality of the label was so totally based on the personality of the designer himself that, when he died, the charisma died with him.

Roy Halston Frowick was a ground-breaker, a designer who, in the 1960s and 1970s, united high fashion with the sleek style and accessibility of American design. His work had more in common with the furniture designs of Charles and Ray Eames, Philip Johnson’s clean-cut architecture and the latest “flivver” to slide off the Detroit car-production lines than anything in European fashion. Like his close friend Andy Warhol, Halston took an ironic look at minimalism and realised that the banality of absolute simplicity would bring the casual confidence that modern American women required. He understood that, for really successful women, clothes didn’t bestow status, they reflected it. In this, he was a true pioneer, to be followed by Calvin Klein, Giorgio Armani, Jil Sander, Azzedine Alaïa and Raf Simons. This does not mean that Halston was necessarily a great designer, but that he was a leader – and leaders often blaze a trail that more skilled designers take to greater heights. Halston was an essential catalyst for fashion modernity.

Surprisingly, given such a trajectory, he was born in Iowa, where his family was involved in farming. The Midwest didn’t hold him for long. Working in Chicago as a window-dresser, Halston – who lost no time in assuming that memorable one-word name – found himself a boyfriend and protector who set him up as a milliner, with a tiny boutique in the chicest hotel in town. From there, it was a small step to New York where, shortly after arriving, he began recreating himself as a modern American fashion myth.

He was helped by the time and the place. New York in the 1970s was considered the epicentre of all that was bold, strong and adventurous, a place where art and fashion fused, a place that had the place – Studio 54 – where anyone who was anyone fought to get in. They wanted not just drugs and sexual debauchery, but the feeling that is at the core of fashion – that you are the centre of everything that is happening, and that no other place on earth matters. Halston was at the pinnacle of it all.

Even so, he had to share the role of king of New York with Warhol. Both had their courts: Warhol’s consisted largely of druggies, transvestites and rent boys; Halston’s was socially superior. The elegant Halstonettes, as his almost entirely female entourage was dubbed, included models such as Pat Cleveland, stars such as Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, fashion figures such as the all-powerful Diana Vreeland and society women, including Lee Radziwill and her sister, Jackie Onassis – for whom, in the 1960s, Halston created a signature pillbox hat.

All this was to pass, however. A mere decade later, Halston was a shadow of this former glory. his downfall was the modern Rake’s Progress of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Wildly promiscuous, he soon began to lose control of both his company and his life. By the time of his death, at 57, the one-time king of New York appeared to be left with nothing except the enduring love, support and friendship of Minnelli, one of the few who stayed with him until the end.

Yet Halston had achieved what he set out to do: he had become a legend. His personal glamour, sophistication and elegant assurance sold women the look he created. But that was secondary to the appeal of his lifestyle. American women dreamt of becoming a Halstonette, buying kaftans, lounge pyjamas and Ultrasuede. That is what Mellon must focus on if she is to revive this most intriguing of labels and make it a long-term player in today’s fashion climate. At this point, there is every hope she will.

Halston is available from www.net-a-porter.com from February 5

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