Remembering André Leon Talley, a Fashion Oracle and an Entirely Original Man

When he wasn’t in our fashion meetings pulling faces of extreme disapproval or giddy enthusiasm (he had the elastic face of a vaudeville comic), André always seemed to be somewhere thrilling, doing something thrilling. Shooting Madonna in Patrick Kelly’s handkerchief skirted dress with her fist in a bowl of popcorn; or Iman at the Paris Ritz in Saint Laurent’s golden brocade Cossack boots; or the newly divorced Ivana Trump flashing her newly plumped cheeks poolside in a sunflower yellow Valentino; or in the wilds of Wales, photographing Lady Amanda Harlech on her horse, dressed in a scarlet Ferré for Dior redingote and made up to kill, a shining top hat anchored with veiling. “Remember, Amanda—natural!” André bellowed from the sidelines, “Above all, NATURAL!”

With my hand on my heart, I have to admit that I was envious of these assignments and of the glamorous stratosphere in which André moved. It was only much later that I understood some of the inner conflict that the flamboyance veiled, and sensed a sadness beneath the seeming frivolity. André, so widely beloved, so loveable and so loving, claimed never to have experienced romantic love.

And it was only later that I came to have some small sense of what it meant to have grown up in the Jim Crow South as André had, where he was largely raised by a doting grandmother who cleaned the latrines at Duke University and dressed impeccably for the church, which would be such a fundamental pillar of her grandson’s own world view. It was a world where, as he described in his autobiographies, 2003’s A.L.T.: A Memoir and the more revealing, frank, and somewhat embittered The Chiffon Trenches of 2020, the fashionable Black women in town had to cover their hairdos with silk scarves before they were allowed to try on hats in the fashionable millinery shop, and where André had to avoid jeering white students in order to buy his cherished copy of Vogue at the local campus newsstand. Small wonder that he wanted to escape into the cosmopolitan world that was revealed in its glossy pages. 

And escape he did, to Providence, and Manhattan, and Paris, cutting a swathe on a scholarship at Brown University (he read French Literature) and manning the switchboard at Andy Warhol’s Factory, in which position he was communicating with the pillar figures at the intersection of art, fashion, performance, Uptown, Downtown, and the gratin of international café society. Later, even as a titan of the fashion world, front row at the Parisian haute couture, André could not escape prejudice, but his very existence led the way, inspiring generations by example.

For all the latest fasion News Click Here 

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! TechAI is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.