Photo: Jenny Gage + Tom Betterton
The fashion world ismourning the loss ofeditor and writerAndré Leon Talley, who died on Tuesday, Jan. 18, at the age of 73.One of the few Black people to reach the top of the fashion world,PEOPLEis honoring his legacy with a look back at a May 2020 feature which chronicled his painful childhood and pioneering career. At the time, Talley was promoting his memoir,The Chiffon Trenches,which would become aNew York Timesbestseller.
He would know. Talley spent more than 30 years at the storied fashion bible — most of that time as Wintour’s right hand — and appeared in several films aboutVogue(including 2009’sThe September IssueandThe Gospel Accordingto André in 2018). Now he’s telling his own story in a memoir,The Chiffon Trenches, using “a voice as big as my body,” he says. “My story is one Black man’s experience in an insulated world.”
But he has much darker memories too. Starting at age 9, he was sexually abused. “It was not one man, it was many — teenagers and men throughout the neighborhood,” he says. “It was painful. It was serial. And it took place in dark places, like the woodshed. I was afraid to tell anyone. At that time, we didn’t have hotlines for sexual abuse or suicide. It has lived with me until I wrote this book.“But he did find an escape. “I would walk across the railroad tracks to the Duke campus, and I would buyVogueandHarper’s Bazaar,” he says. “I would devour them, hanging the pages on the wall — Naomi Sims, Pat Cleveland, the great African-American models. I made my own world.”
André Leon Talley’I found a way to alleviate the pain: through the escapism of fashion and fantasy inVogue'
André Leon Talley
‘I found a way to alleviate the pain: through the escapism of fashion and fantasy inVogue’
Talley left his abusers behind when he moved to North Carolina Central University, then landed a scholarship to Brown University, where he got a Master of Arts degree in French literature. Determined to create images like the ones on his bedroom walls, he moved to New York City, volunteered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and got himself hired as an assistant to Andy Warhol atInterviewmagazine. There he interviewed designer Karl Lagerfeld, who became “a surrogate brother” and later helped him land a job atWomen’s Wear Dailyin New York City and later Paris.
Talley first started atVoguein New York in 1983. At the time, Wintour was the magazine’s creative director, and he initially thought their first meeting was forgettable. “I said hello politely,” he recalls. “I took the subway home two stops and under my door, on engraved stationary, was a note from Anna Wintour: ‘Welcome to Vogue.’ She is that extraordinary.”
Andre Leon Talley, Anna Wintour.Rose Hartman/Getty
The pair soon became “very close.” When she was appointed editor-in-chief in 1988, Wintour named Talley creative director. “I was the first African-American man at that position,” he says. “I thought, ‘Here I am at the top!’ I had my nose to the grindstone but loved it.” He says Wintour was his greatest supporter. He became her rudder, weather-vane, personal shopper — and, at times, even her purse holder. (At one event Wintour left her handbag with him — and accused him of losing her cell phone, he says. It was back at her hotel room; she later apologized via a handwritten note.)
The relentlessness of the work soon caught up with him. In his mid-40s, Talley began to gain weight. “I associated food with love,” he says. “And I never exercised.” Wintour took notice. One day she phoned him, he remembers, and announced: “You’ve got to go to the gym.” He lost some weight, “and then I’d wear my beautiful suits, and I could tell she was very proud,” but the pounds came back.
In 2004, Wintour staged an intervention. Talley would have three extended stays at Duke University’s Diet and Fitness Center and his battle with binge eating continues today. “I cannot control this addiction,” he says. “I am obese.” Talley left the magazine in 2013 but continued as a contributor. He says he was unceremoniously shown the door when he wasn’t invited to the star-studded Met Gala in 2018, where he had emceed arrivals for years.
Larry Busacca/Getty Images
source: people.com
