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.”