The Obligation to Beauty

When the dominant culture abandons cultivating taste and aesthetic through creative excess, they leave open opportunities for once marginal groups to become new elites.

Hulki Okan Tabak/Dancers on a theater stage in Istanbul, Turkey

This article by Ryan Khurana will be published by Palladium Magazine on December 12th, 2025. It will feature in the upcoming print edition PALLADIUM 20: Noblesse Oblige, subscribe today to secure your copy.

In 1990, Roy Halston Frowick, professionally known simply as Halston, lay dying in a San Francisco hospital. The designer who made Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat iconic, who dressed Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor, and who transformed American fashion in the 1970s, was being destroyed by AIDS complications. “I’m just a dressmaker,” he said before he died. “That’s what I do.” Not “I was” a dressmaker. Not reflections on celebrity or Studio 54 or the empire he’d lost. Calvin Klein would later call him one of the greatest American fashion designers who ever lived.

Between 1981 and 1996, AIDS killed an estimated 100,000 gay men in New York City alone. Fashion designers, art directors, gallery owners, theater producers, choreographers; an entire generation whose lives were their art disappeared within fifteen years. Not just the famous names like Halston, Perry Ellis, and Willi Smith, but showroom assistants, stylists, photographers, creative directors, and window dressers. Chester Weinberg, a household name in the 1960s who mentored Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan, has been written out of history books entirely.

The conventional story treats this as a tragic loss of talent. That misses the deeper wound. When these communities died, something died with them that we haven’t recovered: the knowledge of how to live aesthetically, how to organize an entire existence around aesthetic values in ways that produce taste as a natural consequence of being rather than professional competence. To understand this loss requires understanding how taste came to reside in such communities at all.