Still In Vogue
André Leon Talley has many famous friends, some of whom are thanked at the back of his memoir, The Chiffon Trenches: Will Smith, Kanye West, Manolo Blahnik, Renée Zellweger, Oprah Winfrey. His book is ostensibly an account of how he rose to the top of the US Vogue masthead as its creative director, the first black man to do so, but it is those dazzling friendships that make the book compulsive reading.
Karl Lagerfeld flew him via Concorde for a Christmas stay at the designer’s French country house, gifting him with an opal and diamond Fabergé pin with A.L.T. on it. He was so close with Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Radziwill, that he was one of the 200 people invited to her funeral. And when Jennifer Lopez discovered he was not conducting interviews on the red carpet for Vogue’s Met Gala in 2018, she walked past the press corps altogether.
It doesn’t take long to understand his gift for making friends. The man is charming, so charming that, during our interview, I find myself blushing at one of his wildly original compliments (“you have a Kennedy vibe,” he tells me). He transforms a Zoom call from his New York home into an exquisitely-staged experience. Sitting in front of a gloriously floral, chintz-upholstered panel, he is resplendent in a straw boater and one of his ubiquitous caftans (custom ordered in red or black from Au Fil d’Or in Marrakech, although, “I’ve got one pale celadon one which was a mistake”).
Given his considered, considerate approach, it’s no surprise that The Chiffon Trenches is not the bitchy tell-all many readers anticipated. Yes, he had a falling out with Anna Wintour, the imperious editor of US Vogue. No, his portrait of her is not unfair – or even unkind.
As he says, “This is not avengement! This is not revenge porn! I carefully, skilfully crafted it. And she was the first person to have a galley… She was in Paris, it was shipped to her at The Ritz, she called me and we had a conversation and she asked for things to be removed as they were about her private life. She said, ‘I don’t want my children discussed in a book. I don’t want my boyfriend who I’m no longer with to be mentioned. I think your book is very strong.’ And so I took those things out! I respected her enough to do that.”
He reveals that his removal from his prestigious role as head celebrity schmoozer on the red carpet at the Met Gala for Vogue – one of the annual highlights of the fashion calendar – was handled less than graciously by Wintour. He only discovered he had been ousted when he called to see why he hadn’t received instructions about that year’s event. There was no personal call or email from Wintour, despite the fact that they had been friends and colleagues for decades.
“That hurt me, that there was no explanation. Don’t explain, don’t complain is Anna’s way of running her business. That is her prerogative, but it was hurtful … and she showed no empathy towards me, although I had showed great empathy towards her … and that’s a very sad story.”
The richness of the book lies in Talley’s heady experiences, such as when he volunteered for iconic designer Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute in his first year in New York, which led to a lifelong friendship, or the time he spearheaded the 1994 comeback show for designer John Galliano, staging it in a friend’s home. Fashion followers will feast on the minutely-observed details he scatters through the pages like Hansel and Gretel crumbs.
Anna Wintour: “Her kitchen was always spotless, which is directly related to the fact that I’ve never seen her cook anything.” Tom Ford: “He loves black … black suits and hard, tight shoes, also black, and he drives around London in a sleek black custom-made car. Everything in the car is black on black. His hair gets help and is raven black … He thinks about death constantly. He once planned on designing his own black sarcophagus but now has decided on quick cremation, to avoid the messiness of decay.” Karl Lagerfeld: “If Karl liked you, he would say, ‘Go to Chanel and pick out anything you want’.”
And then there is the sumptuous writing. “My clothes are like ceremonial 17th-century Italian armour. They are like traje de luces, bright pink capes lined in yellow, worn by matadors as they enter the billings in Mexico and Spain, or the tight-fitting boleros and trousers of the great flamenco dancers.” Spare he is not, thank goodness.
He may travel with Louis Vuitton luggage, but André Leon Talley grew up in America’s segregated Jim Crow South, raised by his grandmother who built her life around hard work and the church.
“ Follow your instincts. Don’t follow anyone’s advice. When you’re over 45, you’ve already earned your place in life. If you want to be successful in terms of style, in terms of living, you must follow your own rules. Never let anyone persuade you that you’ve got the wrong thing on. If you’ve chosen it, if you’ve selected it, it’s right.”
“I would not be the person I am today if it were not for my grandmother, if I hadn’t grown up in her house. She was very modest; she was a domestic maid for 50 years of her life. And she instilled the values in me of responsibility, discipline, maintenance. I used to wax the floors with Johnson’s Paste Wax, on my knees, scrubbing them so they would polish and shine. I had to make up my bed the proper way, and that was a tool she was giving me for life.”
It was his grandmother’s way to bake biscuits for neighbours and so when Talley receives a special invitation to someone’s home, he often brings a custom Sant Ambroeus marzipan cake. “You can go to Tiffanys or Bergdorfs and get all these scarves and stuff that’s in the world – but a cake symbolises love. I’ve always made sure that it was given to special women and they understood the value of me walking into their house with a cake in the box, and it hadn’t been shipped in by Federal Express. It’s all a part of who I am.”
The darker elements of his life – he was a victim of sexual abuse as a child and to this day hasn’t had a romantic lover – are dealt with in The Chiffon Trenches as well. “After 71 years on this planet, [it] felt like kind of a cleansing, like a baptismal, a rebirth. I felt that this had been bottled up in me for so many decades, so I decided to be honest, to tell the truth.”
Pain seeps through many of the pages. He had a fraught relationship with his mother and did not see his father as often as he would have liked. There’s a terrible moment when Talley is at the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, sitting in the VIP section. Diane von Furstenberg, the designer, urged him to call his mother and tell her where he was. He called her nursing home, only to be told, “Your mother does not wish to be disturbed by anyone.”
Despite his stellar career, his best-selling book and being the subject of a documentary (The Gospel According to André), Talley admits to battling with self-doubt.
“I feel very lonely; sometimes I wake up and I feel like a failure, a has-been. Even with the success of this book, I often wake up feeling very grey and in a sort of low depressive state. And [right now], that’s because I am not connected to the world because of the pandemic.
“So you must connect to something higher than yourself. A good strong tree gives you strength. The beauty of hydrangeas, or of geranium in a clay pot. The red cardinals zooming around through the evergreens. These are the things that give me a sense of calm and measuredness. And friends. But although I say I feel very lonely, I am very strong and I will cope. And I will survive.”
Does he have any advice for Tonic readers? He thinks a moment. “Follow your instincts. Don’t follow anyone’s advice. When you’re over 45, you’ve already earned your place in life. If you want to be successful in terms of style, in terms of living, you must follow your own rules. Never let anyone persuade you that you’ve got the wrong thing on. If you’ve chosen it, if you’ve selected it, it’s right.”
The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley, published by 4th Estate, is now available in hardcover and e-book.
Words_ Rachelle Unreich
Opening photo sourced from_ @andreItalley @randomhouse @harpercollinsu