When André Leon Talley died following a heart attack on Tuesday, the fashion industry lost not just a powerful and extrovertly flamboyant guiding force and one of its most outspoken voices on racism, but a warm, witty and much-loved friend.
“He was original, funny, biting, ornate, and utterly fabulous,” said American journalist Derek Blasberg, who got his lucky break as a Vogue intern under Talley’s tenure as editor-in-chief. “I’ll never forget his kindness and encouragement,” he added.
And the tributes (which have flooded in from the great and the good) have unanimously agreed: the influential fashion journalist was an ebullient and inspiring character who, over the course of his five decades-long fashion career, did much to foster young talent, promote diversity and ultimately champion an inclusiveness and friendliness the fashion industry is not famous for — particularly not when he joined its ranks in the seventies.
“I love people—it is not the fashion, it is the people in fashion I love,” said Talley, who at six foot six inches tall and with a penchant for dramatic dressing (capes, kaftans, gloves and outlandish headdresses were firm favourites), was a recognisable figure wherever he went. Described by The New Yorker in 1994 as “fashion’s most voluble arbiter, custodian, and promoter of glamour,” Talley’s industry knowledge was encyclopaedic and his linguistic expression as fabulously colourful as his clothes. His now-infamous line: “It’s a famine of beauty. My eyes are starving for beauty” has become an oft-shared meme.
“André is one of the last of those great editors who knows what they are looking at, knows what they are seeing, knows where it came from,” Tom Ford said in the 2018 documentary The Gospel According to André of which Talley is star. “He tosses out all these different words and he’s so big and so grand, a lot of people think, ‘This guy is crazy,’ but it’s a fabulous insanity.”
Born in 1948 and raised in North Carolina by his grandmother, Talley, who spoke fluent French and had a master’s from Brown University, began his fashion career with an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974 under former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. Suitably impressed, Vreeland introduced him to Andy Warhol’s Factory and the now-defunct Interview magazine, where he worked as a receptionist and began writing for publications like the New York Times and W magazine.
Talley went on to become Paris bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily before joining US Vogue in the 80s, where he worked for Anna Wintour first as creative director—the first black man to be named as such—then as editor-at-large until 2013.
Talley and Wintour, who has been editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988, spent 30 years as close professional and personal friends, a regular side-by-side fixture on fashion week’s front row and at the opulent parties of their glamorous social set that included Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent.
The pair’s friendship became strained in 2018 when Wintour appointed a YouTube personality to cover the Met Gala in lieu of Talley, who claims in his 2020 memoir Chiffon Trenches (which became a New York Times bestseller) to have been "very hurt" because Wintour never contacted him to tell him. Despite this, he always maintained the book was “a love letter to Anna.”
Talley, who served as a judge on America’s Next Top Model alongside Tyra Banks for four seasons and as stylist to the Obamas during their time in office, was often referred to as “a force of nature” and a “creative genius.” But he had to shatter many a glass ceiling in order to become one of the few black men at the top of a field that was (and in many ways still is) overwhelmingly elitist and white. Described by Will.i.am (with whom he consulted on wearable tech projects after Vogue) as “the Nelson Mandela of couture,’ Talley’s most important legacy will be the work he did to promote black talent on the runways and on the pages of Vogue, and also behind the scenes.
“To my 12-year-old self, raised in the segregated South, the idea of a Black man playing any kind of role in this world seemed an impossibility,” he wrote in his memoir. “To think of where I’ve come from, where we’ve come from, in my lifetime, and where we are today, is amazing. And, yet, of course, we still have so far to go.”
As Edward Enninful, the first black Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, said in his tribute: “RIP Andre. Without you, there would be no me. Thank you for paving the way.”
