…a brief moment for a legend. When André Leon Talley died on Tuesday, I thought of something Rachel Seville Tashjian wrote last October: “THERE ARE THOSE WHO BELIEVE THAT BEING ALIVE IS A WORK OF ART.” Talley was such a person, someone who thought nothing of showing up for breakfast looking like Zhukov defending Moscow. Tashjian clarified: “We’re talking about your actions, tastes and emotions all adding up to something greater, to a foundational, life-defining pursuit of beauty, of discomfort, of emotional heft (DRAMA!), of new and more ways of seeing and looking.” This is also Talley.
André Leon Talley Gave Glamour Intellectual Integrity
The late fashion editor was as obsessed with ideas as he was with beauty.
As the fashion world begins to take stock of the life and impact of André Leon Talley—the industry-defining editor who died Tuesday night at the age of 73—it becomes clear how professionalized his industry has become. How sanitized. Watch him describe Rihanna, completely impromptu, in the 2016 documentary about the Met Gala, The First Monday In May: “I love a girl from humble beginnings who becomes a big star,” he says, tearing up. “It’s like the American dream. That’s the way you do it.” His grand and definitive words gave the frivolity of a celebrity on the red carpet a sense of potency—of almost moral significance, of historical import. He always knew he was witnessing history, and he wouldn’t let anyone forget it.
His intellectual pedigree was paramount. His resume is a guidebook for glamour unto itself: He studied French literature at North Carolina Central University and then went on to write a Masters of Art thesis on Baudelaire at Brown; he was Diana Vreeland’s protege at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute; he worked at Andy Warhol’s Interview; he helped write 20th century fashion history as a reporter and editor for Women’s Wear Daily; he was the creative director of Vogue, which for a long time made him the most powerful Black man in fashion. All of these things made him a groundbreaking figure. But the defining journey of his life was not towards power or one of careerism. Instead, it was a dogged, obsessive pursuit of style, glamour, and beauty. He was always pleased to be a student, and had an extravagantly curious mind. He spoke often of his dismay that young people didn’t learn enough about history, luxury, and literature. He seemed to take as his own mantra something that Vreeland once said about court life in 18th century France: “A religious pursuit of pleasure was the key to daily life.”
He knew the ephemeral was essential, that the frivolous had value. He believed in emotional grandeur, exaggeration; things that people think are meaningless or fluffy. He embraced that fashion is basically defined by conflicts of interest. And he never asserted that fashion wasn’t about those things, but rather felt it was important because it was about those things. His good friend Bill Cunningham said that “fashion was the armor to survive the reality of everyday life.” Talley took it a step further: he made fashion his everyday life.
Talley was a polymath: an editor, a stylist, a celebrity handler, a visionary, a personality, an image-maker. He was also, we must not forget, a writer. In fact, he was a beautiful writer, one of the most poetic to ever take on the subject of fashion. To read his words is to be reminded that cliche and robotic description have no place in fashion criticism. When he profiled Michelle Obama for her first Vogue cover, in 2009, he said that her gaze “is akin to hearing a chord from John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme.’ Or maybe Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Lark Ascending’: All is well and right and real.’” Throughout the piece, he deftly placed her in the canon of First Ladies with a scholar’s finesse, gently guiding away from comparisons to Jackie Kennedy (“Pragmatism, not glamour, is what matters when she gets dressed”) and briskly moving through the legacies of Dolly Madison and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Writing was central to Talley. In one of the most gallant moments in his second memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, he describes the pride he felt after writing a review of Yves Saint Laurent’s January 1978 couture show, which was inspired by Porgy and Bess. He saw fashion writing as a push and pull between the creator’s intention and the spectator’s emotional reaction and knowledge, which is what great criticism is all about: “Watching the show on the runway, with the inside knowledge of Yves’s inspiration, felt like the final step in understanding the deeper artistic nature of true fashion genius. After the show, I went to the office and wrote the most brilliant review of my youthful career.”
He believed that everything in his life added to his work as a journalist and critic, from the people he dined with to the great French novels he grew up reading to the velvet shoes he put on his feet. He reflects on how he spent his time in 1970s Paris, cliqued up with Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, in this way: “And through it all I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I’d meet with designers all day, working my way through the throng to see those who were hot and up-and-coming. And then see them and others all again later that night at a party. Then I’d rush over to WWD headquarters before midnight to type out everything I’d seen and transmit it to New York for the next day’s publication. I never doubted I could be the best writer and stylist for WWD in Paris. They had chosen me. So Paris was my oyster.”
Talley was a gracious critic, bowing at the foot of the spectacle, whether fashion show or celebrity style moment, and then summoning all his knowledge and experience to interpret what he saw. He embodied the fashion exegesis at its finest: a wild, outlandish train of words and thoughts that lead you to imagine, to fantasize, to feel. You begin not merely to fill in the details, but picture yourself there. No fashion journalist or writer has ever connected so directly with their source material; it was the product of a multitude of conflicts of interest, if you want to play by strict journalistic ethics, but it gave his work, and the industry, gravitas.
Crucially, he also saw fashion not as an aspirational bubble divorced from the rest of culture. Even eager students of fashion struggle to reconcile “real life” with what they fantasize about. When a backstage reporter once asked why we don’t see runway fashion on the street, he wagged his finger and told her, “Darling! It depends on what street you’re walking on and going down, AND WHAT TIME OF DAAAY!” He spent his whole life walking down the street of style. As formative to his concept of luxury as his time with Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent was his own upbringing in North Carolina, particularly the habits of his maternal elders. “On Saturdays my great-grandmother and my grandmother would build a fire in the backyard under the peach trees,” he told the New York Times back in 1992. “They would starch the clothes in a cast-iron pot over the fire, stirring it with a stick. That stays with me.” He would repeat such anecdotes throughout his career—about his grandmother’s pageantry, about the fashion show that was attending church, about being the first kid on the block with alligator shoes. And not because he saw this as some sort of juxtaposition: for him, life was one giant system of glamour, a constant expansion of his path through the world. If you rewatch The September Issue, you’ll see how he approached fashion editing as a form of journalism. The runway clothes created a story and themes that needed to be contextualized and explained through styling and photography.
He was old school in a multitude of ways. He believed in the fashion system, often to his detriment. He subscribed, with painful devotion, to the ego-driven insecurities that form fashion’s power structure, and its essentially codified system of back scratching. Both A.L.T., his first memoir, and The Chiffon Trenches, his second, are filled with tales about creating decadent moments in his life that he recalls with unapologetic joy. Lagerfeld invites him to Biarritz, but Talley feels his luggage isn’t up to par, so the designer tells him to go buy whatever he wants and foots the bill. Later, Lagerfeld pays Talley $30,000 to serve as editor on a photoshoot, and puts him up at the Ritz; Talley then spent the entire $30,000 to stay on in the suite for three more weeks.
But even if he wasn’t a modernist, per se, he also embraced the now. He got Rihanna. He was obsessive about learning about new designers. When Public School became an early darling of the luxe-streetwear moment, he commissioned them to make him one of the famous caftans that became his late-in-life signature. He often rhapsodized about the talents of the young photographer Tyler Mitchell, in particular because of the way Mitchell broke with the fashion photography mold of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon.
Much has been said throughout Talley’s life about his status as “the only one”—indeed, the phrase served as the title of a painful 1994 New Yorker profile by Hilton Als—and he was occasionally accused of not doing enough to support younger Black talent. On the one hand, there will never be another André Leon Talley, because he was so original, so outrageous. But on the other, why shouldn’t there be? If he was camp, at times problematic, too addicted to glamour, he was equally a person obsessed with ideas, who wanted everyone to be more inquisitive. And he gave glamour value and meaning. He gave glamour intellectual integrity.
From The September Issue:
“So far, it’s been a bleak streak over here in America! You know what? It’s a famine of beauty. A famine of beauty, honey! My eyes are starving for beauty!”
