Andre’s spectacular rise and eventual fall at Vogue
Style icon, bestselling author and former Vogue creative director, Andre Leon Talley reveals what truly happens behind the scenes in the world of high fashion.
During Andre Leon Talley’s first magazine job assisting Andy Warhol at interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfield began a decade-long friendship and propelled Talley into the upper echelions by virtue of his shared knowledge and adoration of fashion. Twenty something reporter Tally at the interview magaxine, marked his official entry into the inner sanctum of high fashion.
The first time Andre Leon Talley met Karl Lagerfield, the designer invited him into his bedroom, flipped the lids of his Goyard trunks and began flinging his bespoke crepe de Chine Hilditch & key shirts at Talley “like a geyser spitting forth toxic ash”.
For forty years they would remain close, holidaying together, telephoning daily, cementing Talley’s place in the fashion firmament until Lagerfield suddenly five years before his death cut him off.
He moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild’s Women’s Wear Daily, befriending fashion’s most important designers. A fraught encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.There he developed an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour, and as she rose to the top of Vogue’s masthead, Talley became the most influential man in fashion.
The Chiffon Trenches is the tale of an African-American man’s spectacular rise from the segregationist Jim Crow South to the hallowed halls of Vogue and his eventual fall.
Arriving just as protest against racism and police brutality took off in the US, it has added fuel to the fire now encircling many companies including Vogue’s owner Konde Nast.
Tally now 71n achieved his dream against all odds , through sheer force of intellect, personality and hard work and a daring sense of style is remarkable.
The book captures a bygone world where everyone in fashion knows everybody else, where on is expected to know what a martingale back is to Balenciaga one-seamed coat, and where black American Express cards are handed out to your closest friends.
The story starts in Durham, North Carolina, where Talley is rasied by his grandmother, a maid on the Duke University Campus. As a child Talley developed a love for French culture and dreams of inhabiting the glamorous world presented in the pages of Vogue. He recalls and said “ to my twelve year old self, raised in the segregated south the idea of a black man playing any kind of role in this world seemed an impossibility”.
Tally wins a scholarship to Brown University, where he obtains a masters degree in French studies and through the father of a wealthy friend, an introduction to Diana Vreeland, the legendary former editor of Vogue and through her Talley lands a job with Andy Warhol at Interview Magazine where he is introduced to the “elite echelon” who orbit Warhol and Studio 54, Princes Caroline of Monaco, Grace Jones and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Soon he is poached by Women’s Wear Daily where his clean copy and friendship with Lagerfeld eventually win the notice of the owner John Fairchild, and a promotion to Paris bureau chief.
The night he lands he is whisked off to dinner by Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent.- a rare coupe as two rivals rarely consent to appear at the same parties, let alone same dinner table.
The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir by AndrèLeon Talley, Ballentine Books $28, 304 pages