South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Fashion sale of the century
Talley’s collections will be auctioned off with proceeds split between 2 churches
Andre 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, New York, and Durham, North Carolina, 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?
“Andre was very, very specific,” said Alexis Thomas, the executor of his estate. “He left a very clear will.”
And that was: Sell. Sell it (almost) all. The proceeds are to be split between the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and the Mt.
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.
“Basically what Andre 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 will be on view as Christie’s unveils “The Collection of Andre Leon Talley,” a 448-lot auction that began a three-city tour Wednesday in Palm Beach, Florida, days after Martin Luther King Day. The tour will continue 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 will open online starting 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.
“Andre, 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.
“Internally he was constantly negotiating that reality,” Walker said. “He had a consciousness that was informed by the history of racism and his own experience of racism both growing up and in the industry. He was a very private person and a master of compartmentalization, largely as a reaction to that. He didn’t reveal himself to many beyond the news release. But on the bookshelves of his White Plains house were scholarly books on 17th-century French court dress next to first edition copies of Paul Robeson’s biography and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s history of
Black America.”
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 Andre did not expose.” Whoopi Goldberg has written an essay for the catalog; designer LaQuan Smith spoke at the Palm Beach event; and in New York, the Abyssinian Baptist choir will perform.
Christie’s has put a current low estimate on the sale of $702,200. Historically, however, personal estate auctions often far exceed the estimates because of the unquantifiable emotional dimensions involved. At the recent Joan Didion sale at Stair Galleries, for example, a pair of Celine sunglasses valued at a few hundred dollars sold for $27,000. At Christie’s own sale of the Joan Rivers estate, a silver dog bowl engraved with her pet Spike’s name estimated at $500-$800 ended up selling for more than $13,750.
“You know, we have no clue what will capture people’s imagination, what will get people to bid against one another,” said Elizabeth Siegel, the head of private and iconic collections at Christie’s. “Will it be one of Mr. Talley’s amazing caftans, or will it be a portrait of him?”
“I used to always say, ‘Andre, why don’t you just sell some of this stuff that you have — you could be living like a king,’ ” Thomas said, a coded reference to the fact that Talley was famously bad with money, seeing it largely as a means of acquiring the things he loved rather than paying, say, a tax bill (a pattern that contributed to a dispute over the ownership of his White Plains house that was settled just after his death). “He was always saying, ‘No, Alexis, that’s my legacy.’ ”
And so it will be, although perhaps not in the way anyone would have expected. Ultimately, Talley wanted his memory contained not in the objects he acquired but how he chose to dispose of them.
“That,” Thomas said, “is what Andre wanted the world to know about who he was.”