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“Fashion’s been very good to me,” says André Leon Talley, tucking into a filet mignon at our secluded corner table inside the Carlyle hotel. We’re here to talk about Kate Novack’s new documentary on his life, The Gospel According to André, which he loves and is proud to have out in the world—even if the filming of it “was a bit like open-heart surgery,” says André, who’s dressed today in “a typical Marrakech maroon shirt over a silk caftan very much like what the men in North Africa wear” and a quilted scarf made from vintage fabrics by Jeanette Farrier. “Kate kept begging to go into my rooms and see my clothes—and I let her have a little peek—but I wasn’t having her rummage through my closets! Ugh! Possessions are too much after a certain age.”
The film—shot variously in André’s bucolic colonial house in White Plains, New York; his grandmother’s house in Durham, North Carolina, where he was brought up; and out and about in Manhattan—rummages through everything else in André’s life, beginning with his precocious childhood. “My bedroom was wallpapered with images out of Diana Vreeland’s Vogue,” he says. “Jane Holzer, Pauline de Rothschild; I did not paper my room with Joe DiMaggio and Burt Reynolds.” It goes on to track his apprenticeship with Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, his work at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, his Vogue years, and beyond. It’s a life at once glamorous, glittering, eventful, and . . . colorful.
“Mrs. Vreeland wouldn’t say, ‘Would you please put the gold lamé dress on the mannequin?’ André says before settling into a gleeful, jaunty impression. “She would say, ‘Cleopatra!’ And then she’d stand up and start acting like Cleopatra, and she’d say, ‘Now, you know she’s a teenage queen, and she spends all her days in the sun, and she’s beautifully tan, in this beautiful garden with beautiful albino peacocks trailing behind her—they’re her favorite pets. Now get cracking!”
Watch the official trailer for The Gospel According to André:
And while the documentary’s many boldfaced names—Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Diane von Furstenberg, Valentino, and Whoopi Goldberg among them—add wattage to André’s lively life, it’s the glimpses of his formative years in North Carolina that provide both poignancy and perspective while illuminating what stands out now as a singular vision.
“I loved my home and my family,” André says. “I went to school and to church and I did what I was told and I didn’t talk much. But I knew life was bigger than that. I wanted to meet Diana Vreeland and Andy Warhol and Naomi Sims and Pat Cleveland and Edie Sedgwick and Loulou de la Falaise. And I did. And I never looked back.”
Indeed—it’s a life so rich, so fully packed, that our contemporary world sometimes pales in comparison. This year’s Oscars, for example? “Helen Mirren standing next to a jet ski? No. Give me Barbra Streisand stumbling up the steps in an Arnold Scaasi see-through pantsuit, or Katharine Hepburn in a turtleneck and a pair of slacks like she just walked off a golf course. I changed the channel and watched Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express. I mean: Mary J. Blige in white Versace? Beautiful. Jimmy Kimmel: No. Let’s have Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopi Goldberg. Let’s bring women back.”
I ask André what he makes of the #MeToo theme that seems to be informing our world in new ways almost every day. “I think it’s great,” he says, con brio. “You must absolutely groove with the moment you’re living in. Life—like fashion—should be liberating and individualistic. It’s not about trends; it’s about what makes you feel great. And that’s something I’ve pursued all my life.”
André talks up his favorite American designers below.
Tom Ford
Tom has managed to be what every designer wants to be: not only a designer but a poet, an artist, a filmmaker, a perfumer. He doesn’t follow anyone; he makes his own rules and does what he wants to do. For me, he’s always echoed the sophistication of the ’70s, when dazzling, unapologetic, in-your- face glamour was at its height—Bianca Jagger in a white satin suit; Diana Ross, Studio 54.
Carolina Herrera
I did her first interview ever, before she was even in fashion. She used to come to the Met ball from South America, and she always had the most extraordinary dresses from Paris that nobody else could find—and her own designs reflect that kind of glamour. I loved the finale of her last show, with her trademark white cotton shirts and big dinner skirts, long with bright colors, with trains of silk. It was very American, like Slim Keith or C. Z. Guest.
Ralph Lauren
Ralph has, for 50 years, been listening to nobody other than himself while reinterpreting and redefining definitive American style—largely as viewed through the prism of cinema. His collections aren’t just collections—they’re epic narratives, and they’re entire lifestyles: The Great Gatsby or some French Riviera fantasy or, in this case, the West. Who else cuts such a broad swath?