André Leon Talley Was Black Excellence in Action

It’s hard not to fall into clichés when talking about the death of a fashion titan like André Leon Talley, but they all hold true. He was, of course, a trailblazer, a legend, an icon. His career trajectory is well-known, working with a delectable mix of it-people and it-publications: He apprenticed for Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, worked with Andy Warhol at Interview, was the Paris bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily, and notably became Vogue’s first African American male creative director in 1988.

André had an innate, unforced grandeur, and an insatiable appetite for splendor. His was a life fascinated with chronic opulence, and the people that perpetuate it. But he was more than the flamboyance of a caftan, more than a statuesque apparition at Studio 54. Yes, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of fashion history. Yes, his generosity was unparalleled. Yes, he was fiercely loyal. But there’s something more that’s kept all of us so happily enthralled.

For me, André’s magic was in his singularity; he didn’t look like anyone else. Fashion is not brimming with six-foot-seven, lavishly-dressed Black men who talk in lyrical stanzas. His appearance in the front row or on the red carpet always seemed remarkable. André didn’t sound like anyone else. He wasn’t brash—to be brash is to somehow bulldoze other people’s emotions—but he was never restrained or quiet. There was a feeling that he was always on the verge of hysterics, which he channelled into a show report of dancing prose, his vocabulary a superpower.

To put a finer point on it, André was simply elegant. And he was elegant in a world where elegance is often equated with whiteness and thinness and a certain withholding of emotion. It’s important to remember that un-thin Black men don’t start on the same rung of the privilege ladder as everybody else. I don’t want to reduce André Leon Talley to his Blackness, to a “Black man in a white world,” but Talley’s legacy will always be tied up in his visibility.

I’d love to say his life in the chiffon trenches is separate from his race, that his success was pure and simple. I’d love to say that what he did and how he did it wasn’t connected to his ethnicity. I’d love to say his Blackness didn’t matter. But it did. His success was Black excellence in action—signed, sealed, delivered.