AIR-KISSING AND BACK-STABBING |

Top Vogue stylist, Andre Leon Talley, reveals how his fashionista friends cruelly dropped him ....

GROWING up in Durham, North Carolina, in the ’50s and ’60s, Andre Leon Talley spent hours devouring the glossy magazines.

“I dreamt of living a life like the ones I saw in the pages of Vogue, where bad things never happened,” he writes at the beginning of his gossipy, bitter and poignant memoir,

The Chiffon Trenches: A memoir.

Bad things certainly did happen to the young Talley.

His mother, miserable after her divorce from his father, handed him over to his grandmother. The granny was kind but strict and she did not hug him. He was sexually abused by an adult, and kept it secret.

He emerged into adulthood a supreme expert on fashion, a snappy dresser, sexually repressed, emotionally fragile and craving approval. Tall, slim and handsome, he dazzled ’70s New York in his Bermuda shorts, pin-striped shirt, aviator glasses, knee socks and moccasin penny loafers.

He began his meteoric rise as an apprentice to Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then worked for Andy Warhol’s magazine, while living in a youth hostel.

Talley had a gift for dressing others and for writing about fashion. His advice and expertise would become invaluable to magazine editors. When he arrived in Paris in the late ’70s, promoted to European fashion editor of Women’s Wear Daily, the fun started. But so did the sense of insecurity, and the racism.

He was referred to by an Yves Saint Laurent publicist as “Queen Kong”; and a jealous colleague falsely accused him of having been in and out of every designer’s bed in Paris.

He resigned, but in 1983 he was taken on by Anna Wintour at American Vogue, where she promoted him to creative director. He stayed for 30 years.

Karl Lagerfeld and Wintour adored and doted on him for years. From the day he interviewed Lagerfeld for a magazine profile, their friendship blossomed. Lagerfeld sent him daily handwritten letters, and most nights they talked for three hours on the telephone.

He lapped up the high life. If Lagerfeld liked you, he showered you with generosity: private jets, chauffeured cars to bring you to his country residence, expensive clothes chosen by him.

With Wintour, “the bond of friendship was never spoken about. It was just perfectly understood by us, like a silent language”. Talley was thrilled when she promoted him and he became “the highest ranking black man in the history of fashion”.

He describes her impatient habits, such as eating so little that going out to restaurant lunches with her was pointless: she would say “shall we go back to the office?” before the first course even arrived.

She seemed kind, treating Talley “like family”. She even got him an interest-free loan so he could buy a house for his grandmother.

With hindsight, we can glean that what Wintour most valued in Talley was his understanding of, and closeness to, Lagerfeld. “I was the Karl Lagerfeld editor of Vogue,” he quips. So when, in 2013, after 40 years of friendship, Lagerfeld turned off the love, it was the beginning of a slow but sure downfall.

Lagerfeld was cross because

Talley had agreed to help with an exhibition of a rival photographer’s work (Lagerfeld prided himself as a photographer). “I just became a ghost from his past.”

Binge-eating was his way of drowning out the pain. It had started when his grandmother died and worsened after the Aids epidemic.

Wintour sent him off, expenses paid, to the Duke Diet & Fitness Centre in Durham, where he lost 25kg, but he soon put it all back on.

One gets the sense that this eventually all became too much for the fastidious, bird-like Wintour, whose main obsession was with drycleaning her clothes. She and Talley had a brief first falling-out in the mid-’90s, when Talley felt she wasn’t valuing his talents.

He stormed out of her office, and went to work at Vanity Fair for a year. But they had a touching reconciliation when he later turned up at her mother’s funeral in England. She broke down in tears during the eulogy and he cradled her in his arms. She invited him back to Vogue to be an editor-at-large.

Talley was of less use to her from 2013, after he’d been dropped by Lagerfeld. She gradually froze him out, spiking his stories, not inviting him on shoots, quietly stopping his podcast and maintaining a “sphinxlike silence” when he asked her why.

“She had decimated me with this silent treatment so many times. This is the way she resolves any issue.”

The “chiffon trenches”, were a place of “air-kissing and backstabbing”. Wintour “simply put me out of her existence”. When they see each other now, they exchange “perfunctory salutations”.

“The Empress Wintour, in her power, has disappointed me in her humanity… she has mercilessly made her best friends people who are the highest in their chosen fields. Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Mr and Mrs George Clooney are, to her, friends. I am no longer of value to her – too old, too overweight and too uncool.’

All a bit self-pitying, whingeing and self-indulgently score-settling? It is rather, especially as Talley was 69 when he was dropped from doing the Met Gala interviews, and flounced out in a huff.

Beneath it all, though, we see the damaged boy. His final poignant sentence sums up the way his life has been one big emotional cry for help: “I only wanted love.” | Daily Mail