The iconic fashion editor tells Vanity Fair contributing editor Vanessa Grigoriadis in the September issue that “the world has become too casual, and people have become lazy. There was a time when people went on the airplane with gloves.” Talley tells Grigoriadis about the gloves worn by such ladies as Kerry Washington, Michelle Obama, Beyoncé, Jackie O, and his friends Pauline de Rothschild and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis: “It’s about gloves, O.K., darling? It’s about gloves. Listen.”
Talley tells Grigoriadis of his childhood in Durham, North Carolina, where he was raised by his grandmother in the 1950s and 1960s. Bullied in his black neighborhood, Talley found solace in the fashion magazines, including Vogue, which he bought on the Duke University campus, and reading John Fairchild’s memoir of couture, The Fashionable Savages, so many times he “practically memorized it.”
When Grigoriadis asks Talley if he thought he was gay, even in high school, he responds, “No, no, no. I was just into my magazines and the drawings. I had a very strict upbringing, almost puritanical. I lived there all the way through college. I was in my grandmother’s house, and I respected that!” Talley tells Grigoriadis that he rejects the “label” and says that, while he has “had very gay experiences, yes, I swear on my grandmother’s grave that I never slept with a single designer in my life. Never, ever desired, never was asked, never was approached, never, ever bought, in my entire career. Never. Not one. Skinny or fat. Never.”
Talley also tells Grigoriadis that he has never been in love with a man—only two women: one a fellow student in Providence, the other a society woman with whom he fell in love after a night of dancing in Manhattan and whose name he declines to share because she later married and had children. On being single, Talley says, “I just said to a friend, ‘I can create this magic, so why don’t I have a lover?’” But, he tells Grigoriadis, “if I was a couple, I wouldn’t like to stay in the same bedroom. It is very un-chic in Europe to sleep in the same bedroom.”
Of his close relationship with Anna Wintour, his former boss at Vogue, Talley tells Grigoriadis, “I wouldn’t have stayed at Vogue as long as I did without Anna being there. She was my biggest ally. There could not have been another way.”
Talley says he’s never seen Wintour with a hair out of place: “Ms. Wintour has had her bob since she was in her 20s. I have never seen her hair pulled back. Never. Not even at tennis.” A colleague of Talley’s points out that “Anna and André are best buddies . . . This is the only man who could see Anna in her underwear.”
Grigoriadis reports on Talley’s longtime struggle with his weight. “I do not weigh myself,” Talley claims. “I do not want to get on that scale. I only know what I weigh from the way my clothes fit.” He reveals that he had a lap band that has not worked; he keeps eating even with it in. “The people who are really close to me and know me have stopped bringing my weight up,” he says. “They probably discuss it behind my back, some of them, in the fashion world.” But his weight has never affected his self-esteem. “I have never felt less of a person because of my dramatic weight gain,” Talley says. “Up or down, my confidence and sense of self never wavered.” Talley tells Grigoriadis that he is “usually always right” about clothes and other topics, though at one point he adds, “Except about myself.”
Talley tells Grigoriadis that he sometimes wonders why he’s never been the editor of a major magazine, and that race may play a factor. “People stereotype you,” he says. “What person of color do you know who’s in a position like that, be it a man or a woman, unless it’s Essence magazine?”
Talley, who lives in White Plains, New York, 30 miles north of Manhattan, tells Grigoriadis that he spends his evenings watching a lot of MSNBC: “Five o’clock is Chris Matthews; six o’clock is Reverend Al Sharpton. Then I wait for Rachel and Lawrence. And I’ll probably look at Judge Judy. I wish she were my friend.”
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd calls Talley a “fashion sniper,” and describes her relationship with him as a “cultural collision. He is high-fashion and I’m no-fashion.” Talley stayed with Dowd during the last presidential inauguration, and Dowd tells Grigoriadis that Talley stopped her at the door: “Arms folded stubbornly, he told me I could not go out looking like ‘a road-show Rita Hayworth,’ and said I had to either iron the dress or change. I changed. He rolled his eyes when I wore some [stylish] dark-green booties with a black dress to a reception with the Obamas, noting that booties were for going to Starbucks, not the White House. When we went to [a] Met opening I wore a long dress a friend had given me that she found on eBay, a Reem Acra mermaidy-looking seafoam-colored dress. I felt very ethereal until André took one look, picked up a bit of the skirt, and murmured ominously, ‘Tulle. Blanche DuBois.’”
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