Man of Style
André Leon Talley's Memoir of Fashion and Family
By CHRIS SCHMIDT
André Leon Talley, longtime Vogue editor, fashion show fixture, and gregarious, fur-clad bon vivant, may be the world's foremost arbiter of excess. As creative director of Vogue from 1988 to 1995, Mr.Talley acted as high swami, pushing photographers, writers, and designers to ever-greater heights of opulence. In recent years, Mr. Talley has been somewhat defanged in his current position as Vogue's editor at large, but he continues to assert his worldview with a monthly Vogue column called Stylefax, and in regular television appearances on Metro channel's Full Frontal Fashion.
Now, at the age of 54, Mr. Talley has published a memoir entitled A.L.T. (Villard, $24.95). It is really two books in one: The first is a catalogue of fashion dish, standard fare in the world of haute couture, though Mr. Talley tries to downplay this aspect. More prominent is the other half of A.L.T., an inspiring story of how a self-described gangly outsider from Durham, N.C.,became the single most influential African-American man -- if not man, period -- in fashion journalism.
At 6-foot-7, the barrel-chested, gap-toothed editor turns heads wherever he goes. Rather than compensate for his size, Mr.Talley accentuates it, donning extravagant clothing like chincilla coats and brocaded floorlength capes. He wears diamonds proudly (a proclivity which he spends several paragraphs trumpeting in A.L.T.). His staccato speech is a mixture of "Vogue-speak" and French delivered with an affected continental accent. Mr.Talley's cult of personality is a rancorous one: Friends refer to him as "Monsieur Vogue"; detractors, "Queen Kong."
In A.L.T., Mr. Talley deflects some of this criticism by casting himself as a mere satellite of two grand women: Mr. Talley's grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, who raised Mr.Talley with a firm but loving hand, and his mentor, legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who was known for dizzy pronouncements like "pink is the navy blue of India" and "[blue jeans are] the most beautiful things since the gondola."
Anyone would relish an opportunity to be a fly on the wall of Mr.Talley and Vreeland's many tete-a-tetes (he often stayed into the wee hours at her home, sipping vodka and trading quips). But Mr. Talley wisely keeps Vreeland in a supporting role in the book. By focusing instead on his relationship with his family, he lends support to an unlikely thesis: that it's not luxury that matters but rather "a sense of place, a sense of self." (That this claim doesn't seem completely at odds with his propensity to hole up with Karl Lagerfeld for Christmas in Paris is a measure of Mr. Talley's charm as a writer.)
Even as the childhood ward of his grandmother, who worked as a maid, Mr. Talley was, in a way, spoiled: "Certainly by the time I was six or seven years old, I was a luxury addict," he writes. It was not expensive possessions that formed Mr. Talley's tastes, but a scrupulous attention to appearances, however modest. In reverence, the young Mr.Talley used to watch his grandmother prepare her immaculate Sunday church clothes, which wouldn't have been complete without a bespoke hat and spotless white gloves. For Mr. Talley, the importance of maintaining a proper appearance came to assume a near-moral dimension.
The quality that linked his grandmother and the extravagant Vreeland, Mr. Talley writes, was an insistence on "polish." Once, in Vreeland's company, Mr. Talley crossed his legs, revealing signs of wear on the bottom of his shoes. A "Kabuki expression of surprise" crossed Vreeland's face, followed by a lecture on the importance of grooming even the rarely seen parts of one's outfit. "I think that what she was asking of me was that I polish myself in every way possible, from the soles of my shoes to the deep recesses of my mind."
After a childhood with his grandmother,Mr.Talley attended state college in Durham, and then went to Brown to pursue a Ph.D. in French literature. He abandoned his studies after receiving an M.A., however, and moved to New York City to follow his dream of becoming a fashion editor.
During his first few years in New York,Mr. Talley lived on ambition and excitement alone, sleeping on friends' couches and at the YMCA, while working as an unpaid assistant to Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute and Andy Warhol's Interview magazine.
But the struggle was short-lived. After landing a position at Women's Wear Daily, the fashion industry's trade paper, "I advanced fast on a combination of talent, passion, curiosity, good fortune, and a little dose of Southern charm," Mr. Talley writes. "I had been raised to be polite and courteous, which, as it turns out, is rare enough to take a person far."
Mr.Talley is mostely mum on his tenure as Anna Wintour's righthand-man at Vogue -- no doubt for reasons of job security. But he does manage to stitch a few priceless fashion anecdotes into his travelogue to the top. A dinner with 1970s designer Halston that included a baked potato, caviar, and platter of cocaine (the potato was for Mr. Talley, the coke for Halston, who, unsurprisingly, did much of the talking). And then there was the time Vreeland mistook Josephine Baker's pet cheetah for a movie theater armrest.
Although the veracity of the latter story is debatable ("exaggeration is the only reality," Vreeland was known to have said), it captures the essence of glamour. Mr.Talley himself rarely reaches such extremes of storytelling, yet his story does seem gilded in one respect. While Mr. Talley doesn't completely elide the subjects of homophobia and racism, he relegates them to single childhood experiences, rather than representing them as the omnipresent factors they surely are. (In fact, Mr. Talley's sexuality goes completely unmentioned in the memoir.)
A.L.T. is a testament to Talley's consirable charms as writer and raconteur. But in the end, the memoir suffers from Talley's perfectionism, the impulse -- no doubt honed by years in the fashion business -- of always whitening the teeth. Mr. Talley would be far better served by easing off the airbrush and give us more of what we want from fashion gossip: the dirt.
