“I wasn’t supposed to be a fashion editor, I wasn’t supposed to be in Paris, and I certainly wasn’t supposed to be on the front row, yet there I was.”
And was he ever. André Leon Talley’s, aptly titled “The Chiffon Trenches” from his own lexicon of colloquialisms, strikes a pose and a nerve, depending on how you receive it.
As the first Black man to rise to the top of the fashion world more than four decades ago, Talley had the ultimate access and influence – at Interview, at WWD, at Ebony, and, ultimately, at American Vogue as Creative Director under Editor in Chief Anna Wintour.
Along the way, Talley divulges a dossier of the haute life, taking us on a transatlantic sojourn of resplendent highs and unforgettable lows.
In recent weeks, much ink has been devoted to all of this, from his formative time assisting fashion icon Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and working for Andy Warhol to dinners with Halston, his deep friendship with Karl Lagerfeld, and, of course, the time at Vogue and his personal and professional ties to Wintour.
And he doesn’t hold back. Talley talks about facing racism in fashion, both covert and overt. His friend Paloma Picasso alerted him to a particular incident in Paris. “As much as it hurt, Paloma had done me a huge favor,” he writes. “She had opened my eyes to a reality I so badly wanted to deny.”
He tackles his weight gain, which led to an intervention by Wintour and Shelby Bryant, his pastor Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, and Oscar and Annette de la Renta, and recalls a near death experience after writer Julia Reed’s wedding. Returning Wintour’s rental car early in the morning, Talley fell asleep behind the wheel, crossed two lanes and turned over three times. “Is my luggage okay?” he asked the man who came to rescue him out of the totaled car. “The car’s a rental, my luggage is Louis Vuitton!”
Talley also expresses his admiration of CFDA Chairman Tom Ford.
“Tom Ford is one of my close friends in the firmament of style. We regularly stay in touch by email,” Talley told me. “And when I needed a Met Gala look, Tom always came through with exclusive designs made for me. In 1999, he made a floor length black leather Gucci coat, embroidered in Regency gold giant floral patterns. I have so many beautiful clothes, capes and ceremonial coats designed by Tom. I feel close to him, closer to him because he knows that I speak a language of style that is based on knowledge and experience.”
It’s a language as enchanting as André Leon Talley himself, whose star, as the book proves, is enduringly on the ascent.
Order the book here.
