San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Talley fashion auction to benefit two Black churches
André Leon Talley, the barrier-breaking Black fashion editor, was famous for his love of extravagant things and extravagant gestures. For striding through the world in a fabulous designer caftan and towering fur hat, a set of monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks at his side as he unfurled his pronouncements: on beauty, designers, the meaning of life.
So after he died in January 2022 with no heirs, the speculation began: What would happen to the collections he had amassed over the decades and squirreled away in his homes in White Plains, N.Y., and Durham, N.C., an Aladdin's cave of artifacts that represented a certain style of luxury in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries?
Would they be left to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Talley had begun his career assisting Diana Vreeland in the Costume Institute, and where he often presided over Vogue's Met Gala red carpet livestream? Would they go to the Savannah College of Art and Design, where Talley had curated Oscar de la Renta and “Little Black Dress” exhibitions? Would they be used to establish a scholarship in his name at Brown University, where he received his master's degree?
“André was very, very specific,” said Alexis E. Thomas, the executor of his estate. “He left a very clear will.”
And that was: Sell. Sell it (almost) all. The proceeds to be split between the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and the Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, where he grew up. Communities that represented his private life, where he had been an active (and activist) member for decades, and where he marched for change
alongside.
“Basically what André did was monetize his fashion assets to secure the financial sustainability of two very important Black institutions of faith,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a friend of Talley’s since 1995.
Exactly what that means is currently on view at christies.com as Christie’s unveiled “The Collection of André Leon Talley,” a 448-lot auction that began a three-city tour just after Martin Luther King Day in Palm Beach, Fla.
The tour will continue on to Paris (during couture) and New York (during fashion week) and culminate in a live auction of 68 lots on Feb. 15, during Black History month (the rest of the sale opened online Friday). The timing is not coincidental.
It is to underscore the final grand gesture of an editor who was often name-checked as an inspiration by Black designers, models and editors, but who was also accused of not doing enough to force fashion’s gatekeepers to face their own complicity in the industry’s racism; of pandering to their bias and blindness in order to keep his most favored status and trading his intellect and knowledge for the allure of a Charvet shirt, or a Chanel tennis racket.
“André, like most of us, just wanted to be loved,” Walker said.
“And one of the reasons he really loved his church family is he was embraced unconditionally, and that wasn’t the case in the fashion world, which sought to put him in a box of the caricature of the fashion diva.”
Even if it was a caricature he helped create and maintain.
Both sides of Talley’s life will be on view in the sale, which is, in some ways, an effort to create a bridge between the two.
It will allow people to see, Thomas said, “the worlds that André did not expose.”