Two meters tall, dressed in fur cloaks, colorful caftans, sometimes even a long coat of crocodile leather. If you are André Leon Talley, for many years the ‘creative director’ or ‘editor at large’ of the American vogue once saw, his appearance was always on your retina. And then you hadn’t even heard him. ‘My eyes are starving for beauty‘ is just one of the famous sayings of the first black man to penetrate the highest echelons of fashion, and who for years seemed not to leave Anna Wintour’s side.
In recent years, the career of Talley, who died January 18 at the age of 73 after a heart attack. In 2020 his position was at vogue hollowed out into ‘contributing editor’ – titles matter in fashion magazines – which in practice mainly involved being present when Wintour tried on the outfit she would wear at the Met Gala, the grand opening of the annual fashion exhibition in the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 2020 was also the year in which he published his second autobiography, The Chiffon Trenches, in which he talked about his childhood, his rise in the fashion world, and revealed how he felt abandoned by Anna Wintour – with whom he really fell out afterwards.
Influence of black women
Talley was born in Washington DC When he was two, he moved to Durham, North Carolina, where he was raised by his grandmother in what he described as “church attendance, regularity, and cleanliness.” He studied French in North Carolina and received his master’s degree from Brown University in Rhode Island, with a thesis on the influence of black women on the work of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Delacroix. In 1974 he became the assistant of Diana Vreeland, who was a former vogue-editor-in-chief who had become the fashion curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, before working for Andy Warhols Interview, fashion newspaper WWD and the black glossy ebony.
Also read: As a black man in fashion afraid to ‘f*ck it up’
In The Chiffon Trenches he talks about the racism he faced in the fashion world. A French public relations woman called him Queen Kong behind his back, at WWD he was accused of having slept with every designer, “as if I were a black buck”. He has not been able to do much for other black people in fashion, he also concluded. He was too busy getting ahead himself, “make it to the next day,” always afraid of “fucking it up” as a black man.
After the death of his grandmother in 1989, Talley developed serious problems with his weight. He himself attributes his binge eating to sexual abuse in his youth; first by a man from the neighbourhood, later also by brothers of friends.
At the expense of Vogue publisher Conde Nast, Talley spent three times in a weight loss clinic. That wasn’t the only time he got something as a present. In The Chiffon Trenches he tells extensively about paid stays in luxury hotels and chauffeured cars, and the enormous quantities of designer clothes and Louis Vuitton suitcases he received from designers. In particular, Karl Lagerfeld, with whom he had been friends for forty years, spoiled him horribly.
That life seemed to Talley, about whom the documentary in 2017 The Gospel According to André was made, to break up last year. He lived in an 11-room house in White Plains, north of New York. It had been bought for him by two friends, to whom he had to pay rent. But the amount he paid monthly varied quite a bit, after which the friends tried to get him evicted. He was still living there at the time of his death.
Talley was praised for his creativity, his intelligence and his ‘larger than life’ personality. “My great strength,” he wrote, “was that I could stand next to small, important, powerful, white women and support them in their vision.”
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