Force in fashion broke barriers in elite industry
André Leon Talley, the largerthan-life fashion editor who shattered his industry’s glass ceiling when he went from the Jim Crow South to the front rows of Paris couture, parlaying his encyclopedic knowledge of fashion history and his quick wit into roles as author, public speaker, television personality and curator, died on Tuesday. He was 73.
His death, after a series of health struggles, was confirmed by his friend Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation.
“André Leon Talley was a singular force in an industry that he had to fight to be recognized in,” Walker said, calling him a “creative genius” and noting his ability to craft a persona for himself out of “a deep academic understanding of fashion and design.”
Called “The Only One” by The New Yorker by virtue of his being the rare Black editor at the top of a field that was notoriously white and notoriously elitist, Talley — 6 feet 6 inches tall — was an unmistakable figure everywhere he went. Given to drama in his personal style (he favored capes, gloves and regal headpieces), his pronouncements (“My eyes are starving for beauty”) and the work he adored, he cultivated an air of hauteur, though his friends knew him for his subcutaneous sentimentality.
He was, said the actress and talk show host Whoopi Goldberg in the 2018 documentary “The Gospel According to André,” “so many things he was not supposed to be.”
He was the receptionist at Interview magazine under Andy Warhol; the Paris bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily under John Fairchild; the creative director and editor at large of Vogue under Anna Wintour. He helped dress Michelle Obama when she was first lady, was an adviser and a friend to designer Oscar de la Renta, and became a mentor to supermodel Naomi Campbell. He cast Campbell as Scarlett O’hara in a shoot for Vanity Fair that reimagined “Gone With the Wind” with Black protagonists long before fashion woke up to its own racism.
He was latterly a judge on the TV reality show “America’s Next Top Model,” artistic director of the online retailer Zappos, an adviser to musician will.i.am’s tech startup and deeply involved with the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Talley was a fixture at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where, according to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, he arrived with celebrities such as Mariah Carey and Tamron Hall but was known for his serious faith.
Talley, who was gay, lived alone and had little semblance of a romantic life, had no immediate survivors.
André Leon Talley was born on Oct. 16, 1948, in Washington, D.C., to Alma and William Carroll Talley. From the age of 2 months, he was raised by his grandmother Bennie Frances Davis in Durham, N.C., where she worked as a maid at the men’s campus of Duke University.
He majored in French studies at North Carolina Central University and received a master’s from Brown University, where he wrote his thesis on the influence of Black women in Baudelaire and Flaubert, and in the paintings of Delacroix.
A chance meeting with the editor Carrie Donovan, then working at Vogue, convinced him that he had to move to New York, and in 1974 he volunteered to help Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.
It was through Vreeland, he wrote in his memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches,” released in 2020 by Random House, that “I learned to speak the language of style, fantasy, and literature.” It was also through Vreeland that he entered the magazine world.
At Interview, he also met Karl Lagerfeld, the Fendi designer whose omnivorous cultural tastes and intellect became his lodestar, especially once he joined Women’s Wear Daily and moved to Paris.
In the late 1980s, his flamboyant tastes and deep fashion knowledge caught the eye of Wintour, for whom Talley became adviser, friend and foil. He even advised Wintour on her Met Gala outfits.
He had struggled with his weight since his grandmother’s death in 1989, and in recent years was largely isolated in the house in White Plains, N.Y., where he lived.