ANDRE the GIANT
Talley a unique, looming presence in fashion world
Andre Leon Talley, the subject of the engaging documentary “The Gospel According to Andre,” is a fashion icon, a literal giant among men and women, a fashion historian and expert with the booming voice and oratory power of an old-style preacher and a caftan-clad unsung hero of the civil rights movement. To complete the picture of Tally as an American superhero, he wears capes.
A product of the segregated South in Durham, N.C., Talley, a gay, black man raised by his beloved grandmother, went from a segregated Durham high school, where only excellence was tolerated, to Rhode Island's famed Brown University. There, inspired by his love of fashion and Julia Child, he majored in French studies and learned to speak fluent French.
Working at the lowest rung of a group of young people at the Costume Institute of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Talley successfully reassembled the scandalous, puzzle-like metal costume designed by Herschel McCoy and worn by Lana Turner in the 1955 sword-and-scandal spectacle “The Prodigal,” and was hired by Institute special consultant Diana Vreeland to stand at her right hand during the show.
Bringing together existing footage of Talley, still photographs and interviews with him, Anna Wintour, Tom Ford, Whoopi Goldberg, Marc Jacobs, Tamron Hall, Fran Lebowitz, will.i.am. and others, “The Gospel According to Andre,” which was directed by Kate Novack (“Eat This New York”), will be a joy to fashionistas young and old and anyone who enjoys an inspiring story. Talley is physically massive (he refers to himself as “a manatee”), and he becomes the center of attention wherever he goes (like the Met Ball) in part because of his size and that voice and those riotously colored capes and caftans.
The film counts down to the 2016 election of Donald Trump and the pins and needles and sense of dread many experienced in those days, and does not shy away from the racism Talley faced (he was referred to as a “black buck” and “Queen Kong” by some colleagues).
Novack shifts back and forth from Talley's evolution to Talley in the present time at his residence in White Plains. N.Y., where he has animals roam the grounds and where he appears to have created an idealized version of his childhood home. When he speaks of Vreeland, it is clear that she was the surrogate for the grandmother he loved and lost, a domestic at Duke University, where the young Talley discovered Vogue magazine in the Duke library.
Talley is convinced that he developed a love for fashion because of the way people in his neighborhood dressed in their “Sunday best” for church. Wintour says she hired Talley in large part because he knows more about fashion history than she does. We hear about his first trip to Paris, where he would serve as the bureau chief for Women's Wear Daily before working for Karl Lagerfeld and later getting his most important job as editorat-large for Vogue, Vogue, Vogue, darling. Hail Andre.