André Leon Talley is no more
Poor and African American, it's not a golden wheelbarrow to land in the fashion world. It was ruled at that time by white people who were almost all of very good background. In The Chiffon Trenches, Leon Talley wrote about discrimination and the bumpy road he had to travel to become editor at large of Vogue USA, a judge on America’s Next Top Model, editor-in-chief of W in Paris, and so on.
Golden lessons in style he received from two women. One: his grandmother, dirt poor, the other: Diana Vreeland, incredibly wealthy. Yet with the same love for style and taste. While he had to scrub and wax the floor with Johnson's with his grandmother, men came every Saturday to Diana Vreeland to put her books back in order and dust them.
Love for detail, but above all being clean and tidy. ‘My grandmother has never washed her hair, the hairdresser did that. She always looked perfectly groomed. She bought little, but then the best shoes that could be found in Durham. And if she went on a trip, she packed her suitcases layer by layer with tissue paper between her clothes that she got from a chic department store.’
Diana Vreeland was his ‘magazine mother’, who took care of this boy. That she had the soles of her shoes polished and her banknotes ironed was for André the epitome of refinement and elegance. He let those lessons live on in the magazines he worked for. He moved in the Champions League of class and style and could persist all those years because of the lessons he received from these two women. It could always be cleaner, better, and more refined.
I have often admired André Leon Talley. For me, it felt like the characters from a soap opera came together at a wedding at the end of a TV season. During Fashion Week, I had all my characters in one shot. André Leon Talley, Grace Coddington, Anna Wintour, and Carine Roitfeld. His death feels like the beginning of the end of an era. Fortunately, his upbringing lives on and he has ensured a tremendous step forward, allowing everyone in the modeling world to work. His highlight: the Vogue with Beyoncé on the cover, made entirely by people of color, and the appointment of Edward Enninful, a black man as editor-in-chief of British Vogue. And every time I hold my muddy boots under the faucet after a walk with the dog or fold a banknote out of the creases (ironing is a bit too far for me), I will think of André Leon Talley.
May he rest in peace.
