As a boy from the segregated South, the life André Leon Talley lived was improbable. Thanks to his pioneering work, it is now possible.
At the age of 12, André Leon Talley discovered the pages of Vogue Magazine.
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“My world became the glossy pages of Vogue, where I could read about Truman Capote’s legendary ball, given at the Plaza, in honor of Katharine Graham. And Gloria Vanderbilt, in her patchwork antique quilts with Elizabethan ruffs, created by Adolfo. I loved seeing her photographed in her simple Mainbocher suits or the exotic Fortuny pleated gowns she kept folded in special coils, like snakes to keep the silk vibrant. I dreamed of meeting Naomi Sims and Pat Cleveland, and living a life like the ones I saw in the pages of Vogue, where bad things never happened,” he wrote in The Chiffon Trenches, a memoir he released in 2020.
Talley, who died today at the age of 73, lived that life, becoming a creative director at Vogue (the first and only Black person, ever), complete with the sumptuous, opulent outfits he described. His trademark was the cape: a long, elaborate train of cloth that he wore like an armor. It both hid his body but announced his presence to the world.
“I used to wear capes and tassels to school, which I found in random thrift shops,” he told Fern Mallis in 2013. In an interview with Lucky, he said that the first cape was a black rubber policeman’s cape.
The first cape that made a splash was a black, herringbone cashmere Hilditch & Key dressing gown he borrowed from Karl Lagerfeld during a stint at Woman’s Wear Daily in Paris. “It caused a scandal. Here comes a Black man representing Women’s Wear Daily in a black dressing gown for a black-tie dinner. Little did they know it was designed by Karl Lagerfeld.”
Talley always stood out: a large Black man (at a height of six feet seven inches) who was always dressed to be noticed. Due to his difference in a world notorious for its exclusivity, it was impossible to live the life he described in the pages of the magazine he grew up reading, where he eventually spent three decades at: a life where bad things never happened.
A 1994 profile written by Hilton Als a few years into Talley’s Vogue directorship described a moment when he witnessed iconic fashion muse Loulou de la Falaise, a woman Talley considered a great friend, nevertheless call him a “n****r dandy,” in a room full of people. Everyone laughed, including Talley, but Als mentioned a split second of devastating clarity where Talley’s eyes shuttered, and his back grew rigid, “as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits.”
“Talley’s fascination stems, in part, from his being the only one. In the media or the arts, the only one is usually male, always somewhat ‘colored,’ and almost always gay,” wrote Als in that same profile. “To all appearances, the only one is a person with power, but is not the power.”
The power was editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. In the book, he described his position at Vogue as such: “I was meant to be by Anna Wintour at all times and encourage her visions. I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision.”
After nearly 30 years at his lofty position, he saw a shift: his role in the magazine started getting smaller, and his decisions stopped counting.
In 2016, when Vogue got into podcasts, Talley was named host (for which he was paid $500 per episode). Until the podcasts stopped, without notice. “No explanation or financial severance compensation. Just sphinxlike silence from Anna Wintour,” he wrote. “But, at the age of 69, I decided I was old enough, and it was time, to stand up for my dignity and take this silent treatment from the great Anna Wintour no more.”
For years, Talley was the red carpet correspondent for the magazine’s coverage of The Met Gala. In 2018, this contract ended, too, and Talley was replaced by a Youtube personality. Talley was informed by a mid-level staffer, and there was no attempt from Wintour to reach out, nary an email or a phone call.
“I was a friend to Anna and I knew I mattered back in our earlier days together,” he wrote. “Today, I would love for her to say something human and sincere to me. I have huge emotional and psychological scars from my relationship with this towering and influential woman.” Thus is the curse of the loyal company man left behind.
Despite all of this, Talley’s influence in helping bring about diversity in the staid, rarefied arena he circulated in was his greatest achievement.
From impressing on the importance of including young black models in fashion editorials at the beginning of their careers like Naomi Campbell and Veronica Webb, or doing a photo feature on New York’s queer people of color, Talley used what he called was his perspective based on a vast cultural knowledge that the old (read: white) guard had no access to. “It had that quality so elusive in the world of fashion: It was new,” he told The Washington Post in 2019. “I sounded no bullhorn over diversity but nurtured it where I could.”
As he was mentored by Diana Vreeland and Carrie Donovan, Talley worked to mentor the next generation. After reading about fashion designer LaQuan Smith in the New York Times, Talley immediately understood that the young man had something special. “I went to his first show and I was blown away. It was stunning. Stunning in its relevancy and its currency,” he told Harper’s Bazaar.
Finding Smith so extraordinary, Talley gave him a $2,000 check and told him to go to Paris. “Paris is the mecca of style and fashion, and just seeing how light falls on the buildings there will inspire you. You don’t have to go to Paris to do a certain thing. I’m not saying you must go to Paris and try to go in and see a designer or get a job,” he said. “Just go there for a couple of days. Go sit down and have a cup of hot chocolate, have a croissant, have a café in a restaurant in the open air.”
Smith went and returned a different man. “I saw him recently before the COVID came,” Talley continued. “I went to the studio in Queens, and he’s still doing great work. He is extraordinary. He is self-made, and it’s extraordinary.”
There will be more after Talley, and it will all be because of him. In his book, he wrote that as a 12-year-old boy raised in the segregated South, the idea of a Black man playing any kind of role in the world of fashion seemed an impossibility.
Thanks to Talley, for any aspiring 12-year-old Black boy, it no longer is. “To think of where I’ve come from, where we’ve come from, in my lifetime, and where we are today, is amazing. And, yet, of course, we still have so far to go,” he wrote.
The day after Edward Enninful replaced a white woman in the role of Editor-in-chief at British Vogue, Talley sent him an email. “He replied succinctly,” said Talley, with “Thanks André. You paved the way.”
Banner Photo from @andreltalley on IG
