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LOS ANGELES - Fashion icon Andre Leon Talley has passed away at the age of 73.
The former Vogue creative director ‘passed away Tuesday at a hospital in White Plains, NY.’ His cause of death is unknown.
Talley is remembered as a driving force in Vogue’s success, serving as the magazine’s long-acclaimed creative director and American editor-at-large through the 1980s and ‘90s.
His death comes just three years after his decades-long friendship with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour ended when she froze him out for being ‘too old, too overweight, too uncool’.
Talley claimed, in a memoir released in 2020, that he was left with ‘huge emotional and psychological scars’ from his friendship with the notoriously icy editor.
However, he also credited her, along with Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol, with shaping his career.
‘I will not criticize her,’ he said in a May 2020 interview with Vulture. ‘My book is an epistle to everyone that I love. It’s a love letter to Anna Wintour. I love her deeply.’
Talley remained prominent in the fashion world, serving as a judge on America’s Next Top Model alongside Tyra Banks, creative director Jay Manuel and runway coach J. Alexander for four seasons.
The larger-than-life fashion figure - his height was 6-foot-6 - also was a stylist for the First Family during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Talley, detailing his fallout with Wintour in his book The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, claimed there was an ‘endless’ list of writers, stylists and models who she has cast onto a ‘frayed and tattered heap during her powerful rule’.