.jpg)
André Leon Talley, the larger-than-life former Vogue editor, has died at 73. Talley was a man of grand pronouncements, extravagant capes, and friends in design studios from New York to Paris—Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Diane von Furstenberg, Karl Lagerfeld, and many more. When the news of his death from a heart attack broke late last night, many of his friends in fashion and beyond took to social media to express their grief, and a theme emerged. The “pharaoh of fabulosity,” as another Vogue staffer once dubbed Talley, was also the industry’s biggest champion and booster, the first editor backstage, quick with encouraging advice or a course correction. His enthusiasm was prodigious.
“The loss of André is felt by so many of us today: the designers he enthusiastically cheered on every season, and who loved him for it; the generations he inspired to work in the industry, seeing a figure who broke boundaries while never forgetting where he started from; those who knew fashion, and Vogue, simply because of him; and, not forgetting, the multitude of colleagues over the years who were consistently buoyed by every new discovery of André’s, which he would discuss loudly, and volubly—no one could make people more excited about the most seemingly insignificant fashion details than him. Even his stream of colorful faxes and emails were a highly anticipated event, something we all looked forward to,” said Anna Wintour. “Yet it’s the loss of André as my colleague and friend that I think of now; it’s immeasurable. He was magnificent and erudite and wickedly funny—mercurial, too. Like many decades-long relationships, there were complicated moments, but all I want to remember today, all I care about, is the brilliant and compassionate man who was a generous and loving friend to me and to my family for many, many years, and who we will all miss so much.”
Talley got his start in fashion with an unpaid apprenticeship to Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, a position he seemed to have willed into being. He once reported that his bedroom “was wallpapered with images out of Diana Vreeland’s Vogue… I did not paper my room with Joe DiMaggio and Burt Reynolds.” From the Met, Talley went on to work at Andy Warhol’s Interview, Women’s Wear Daily, and the New York Times, before taking the fashion news director job at Vogue in 1983. Anna Wintour named him creative director in 1988 and aside from a three-year run when he contributed to W magazine from Paris, he continued to work at Vogue until 2013.
He was the first Black man to hold his position at Vogue, and oftentimes he was the only Black person in the front row at fashion shows. “He was like the Black Rockette… he was the one,” said Whoopi Goldberg, pointing out the whiteness of the industry in the 2018 biopic The Gospel According to André. In that documentary, Talley says, “you don’t get up and say, ‘look, I’m Black and I’m proud,’ you just do it and it impacts the culture.” Nonetheless, he was the first to write about LaQuan Smith, and other designers of color.
In 2003, Talley wrote his first book ALT: A Memoir, which he followed up in 2020 with The Chiffon Trenches. His 2005 book ALT 365+ featured a year’s worth of captioned snapshots of his Vogue colleagues, fashion shows, and designers in repose, including a photo of Von Furstenberg swimming in her Connecticut pool. The book captured some of the irreverence and wit of his legendary faxes, which inspired the essential reading that was his StyleFax column in Vogue.
That old-school fixation aside, Talley came into his own in the age of the internet, as fashion became a form of mass entertainment. He was a big presence in the 2009 documentary The September Issue, which chronicled the making of the year’s biggest issue of Vogue, and the world at large got to know him as an opinionated judge on America’s Next Top Model circa 2010 and ’11. In more recent years, not a single celebrity said no to an Andre interview when they met him at his perch on the top of the stairs on the Met Gala red carpet. “He’s the Nelson Mandela of couture, the Kofi Annan of what you got on,” will.i.am declares in The Gospel According to André. This morning, a video of him cheering Rihanna on at the 2015 Gala was circling widely on social media. His advice to the superstar: “Walk the museum, and just drink the moment. Drink it! This is rare in life. You are so inspiring to so many people. You are going to inspire people in this dress!”
André Leon Talley was born in Washington, D.C. in 1948 and was raised by his grandmother, a cleaning woman at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, during Jim Crow. He went on to Brown University, where he earned his master’s degree in French literature. “I loved my home and my family,” he told Vogue, when the documentary of his life was released. “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.”
