Well-shod feet on the ground
New York
In an industry where a $900 handbag becomes passe in three months and a parade of impossibly beautiful Czech and Russian teenagers in Chanel couture is same old, same old, it takes a lot to impress jaded fashionistas.
But the sight of Andre Leon Talley, the 6-foot, 7-inch editor-at-large of Vogue, sweeping into a fashion show in floor-length sable or crimson crocodile, exchanging handshakes with P. Diddy and air kisses with socialite Nan Kempner, quickens the pulse of even the most imperturbable front-row denizen.
Talley has been on the scene since the Halston heyday at Studio 54 in the 1970s. Now, as Vogue’s unofficial “roving fashion ambassador,” he covers shows, styles celebrity photo shoots, pops up at A-list wingdings and each month writes the magazine’s hip, breezy “Stylefax” column.
He appears to have descended, full-grown and fabulously attired, from some rarefied, clothes-obsessed galaxy far, far away. Don’t be fooled by the flamboyant facade. A paragon of self-invention, Talley credits two remarkable women with shaping his life and career: his nurturing maternal grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, and fashion doyenne Diana Vreeland, the legendary Vogue editor and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
Davis and Vreeland, who both died in 1989, are the focus of his recently published memoir, “A.L.T.” (Villard), an affectionate, poignant recollection of growing up in a close-knit black family in rural Durham, N.C., and making his way through the “chiffon trenches” of New York and Paris.
Davis, a cleaning woman at Duke University, kept an immaculate house and delighted in dressing up for Sunday church services. She ironed her sheets, tinted her white hair with a pale blue rinse and always carried a neatly folded handkerchief in her purse. She may have been poor, but she had, according to Talley, “panache.”
Vreeland also possessed panache. Only she had a staff to look after her tony Park Avenue apartment, pack her Vuitton trunks and care for her elegant wardrobe (a French maid would iron a sheaf of $5 bills before tucking them into her evening bag). Her collection of Porthault linens filled an entire walk-in closet. She became Talley’s mentor when he moved to New York in 1974 and wangled a volunteer job at the Costume Institute helping her to install her fashion exhibitions.
“From my grandmother I learned the lessons of faith and goodness,” says Talley, sipping a cup of coffee in one of his favorite haunts, the cozy private showroom of his close chum, shoe designer Manolo Blahnik. “From Mrs. Vreeland, it was about faith in yourself and your metier and doing the best you can. And they both believed in getting on with it. Get up spit-and-polished, put your best foot forward and get on with life.”
A zest for life
Although it is Tuesday, Talley is dressed in what may be considered his casual Friday garb: a custom-made Juicy Couture gray velour track suit, JP Tod’s deerskin moccasins, a Prada gray alligator coat and matching crusher and a Cartier Tank Divan watch.
At 54, Talley looks about a decade younger, with his unlined coffee-colored skin and boyish, gap-toothed smile. He speaks in clipped diction in a deep bass voice that rises and races lickety-split when he becomes exuberant, whether about the smell of lemon, vanilla extract and Argo starch that emanated from his grandmother’s kitchen or the fabulousness of a Manolo silver stiletto sandal. At once grandiose and down-home, Talley is warmly regarded in a realm where sniping and jealousy have been elevated to an art form.
“If you don’t know Andre, he can seem intimidating because he is larger than life, literally and figuratively,” observes James Mischka, of the design team Badgley Mischka. “But he is very supportive, very approachable. He embraces fashion the way he embraces life, with great enthusiasm.”
Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue and a longtime friend of Talley’s, toasted him last month at an intimate soiree celebrating the launch of his book: “For Andre, God is always in the details,” she told guests. “If he sends flowers, it’s the most exquisite bouquet. If he gives a candle, it’s the perfect candle. And how many of us have, over the years, received those extremely dramatic letters from Andre, penned in striking purple script (for news of medium interest), red ink (a breaking story) or gold (something truly fabulous)! Now he corresponds by fax or e-mail, and it’s such a shame because I miss the gold.”
In his book, Talley tells of being a clothes-conscious young bookworm who read Flaubert and pored over Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, dreaming of a glamorous life far from Durham. But he didn’t aspire to a career in fashion. More practically, he attended North Carolina Central University and went on to receive a master’s degree in French literature from Brown University. He figured he would become a professor and live a quiet academic life. But after spending an exciting summer in New York with rich, fashion-mad Brown chums, Talley decided to forgo a world of Ivy League tweeds for scented peau de soie.
“I didn’t have a plan,” he says, recalling his early days as a $50-a-week gofer at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, where he wrote amusing tidbits about clothes and parties. “It was all chance. I wasn’t pushy. I got my foot in the door with a sense of elegance. It opened, and it all worked out.”
Talley doesn’t serve up much dish or rattle any skeletons buried in Fashion’s attic.
He skims over the heady, hard-partying years when he hung out with Halston, Calvin and Bianca in the 1970s. He doesn’t reveal much about his career at Women’s Wear Daily, for which he was a Paris correspondent. Even Vogue, where he was first hired in 1983, receives little mention.
“I wanted this to be a book about two elegant souls who impacted my life and not some frivolous, nasty insider’s view of fashion,” says the author. “I leave that to others to explore.”
Among the few irreverent snippets found in “A.L.T.” is one about Talley going to the White House to photograph then-First Lady Barbara Bush for Vogue. He dressed for the occasion in his best bespoke suit with a huge gold Yves Saint Laurent rose in his lapel. He encountered Bush in the Lincoln Bedroom.
“She looked me over and asked, ‘What’s that on your lapel?’ ”
“ ‘It’s a gold rose,’ I said, drawing deep from my reserves of Southern politeness.”
“ ‘That’s a lot of rose,’ she said, and then did not say another word to me during the entire session.”
Warm memories
More typical of the memoir are warm reminiscences, like the evenings he spent reading to a frail, blind Vreeland, still alert and lively and sipping vodka in her bedroom. Or how, upon realizing that his grandmother had been buried with her feet facing north and her head south, Talley had her coffin disinterred and turned around “with her head and feet planted properly for her awakening on that Great Getting Up Morning.”
Talley, who is a regular worshiper at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, says that without his church life, he never could have survived the fashion whirlwind.
“Church gives me serenity, patience, balance -- it grounds me,” says Talley, who still keeps Mason jars of his grandmother’s canned tomatoes in his house in Hastings-on-Hudson, a quiet suburb north of New York City. “In fashion, you’re walking on eggshells half the time and dealing with egos that are just impossible. There are a lot of people who have nothing but their fashion lives, which is sad.”
Bethann Hardison, a former model and owner of Bethann Management, says about Talley, whom she has known for more than 30 years, “Although his world is grand, Andre keeps close to those he came up with through the ranks, like me. He always stayed close to his roots.”
Today the Council of Fashion Designers of America will honor Talley with the Eugenia Sheppard Award for fashion journalism in recognition for his “being tireless in reporting on and championing the fashion world,” according to Peter Arnold, the council’s executive director.
“I certainly think I could have gotten the award many years ago for my contributions to Vogue, but I’m very happy to receive it,” says Talley. Still, if he is peeved that the recognition was a long time coming, he is too diplomatic to stir up a tempest in the fashion caldron. “It’s always an honor,” he says. “There are not that many people of my color who get that many awards anyway.”
Does he feel obligated, as perhaps the industry’s most powerful and well-known African American fashion editor, to champion diversity in a business where it took Estee Lauder 57 years to sign its first black model?
“Yes, I feel a duty to promote and encourage people in the world of fashion who are African American, who are all colors, actually,” says Talley, who is a trustee of the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Ga., which named its Lifetime Achievement Award after him.
“At the same time, I feel I have a duty to getting people of color into Vogue.
“I’m not saying I deserve all the credit for getting Eve or Serena Williams or Venus in Vogue, but I think I have a lot to do with it. I certainly hope so.”
For someone who has been around since hot pants came sashaying down the catwalk, Talley is still wildly enamored of clothes.
“I love, love where fashion is today!” he booms. “I love the Saint Laurent collection by Tom Ford, John Galliano -- I consider him like Matisse -- the refinement of Miuccia Prada, the amazing mind of Manolo Blahnik, who comes up with these shoes that women covet like men covet sports cars.”
Talley’s enthusiasm is boundless, and his conversation sprints from Durham to Paris (he loves both cities), Bergdorf Goodman (in honor of his book signing, the store decorated a window with his clothes and personal trinkets) to Fred Segal (he loves its shower gels) to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (where he spoke last month about his book) to the Vanity Fair Oscar party (he has attended two).
“I have piles and piles of chapters that were left out of the book,” he says. “Last spring I was feverishly adding things, mostly about the last two years of my life. But my editors said no. That’s for another book.”
