André Leon Talley Drags Anna Wintour

[MissMagAddict]

Honestly, this is the harmless, petty tea we need during these trying times. Let the girls fight it out.

Exactly.

 

[Benn98]

Whew, I pre-ordered that book so damn fast because I can't wait to read the rest.

 

[Annie Hall]

Lol, yikes. Am I supposed to feel sorry for him? Because I don't.

He should've kept his mouth shut, for this revealed far more about him than it did her. He spent decades volunteering himself as her accessory and enjoyed allll the privileges from it. His grandeur and flamboyance at this time reek of tone-deafness. Waiting in line at the airport? Getting paid less than $500 to talk into a mic for an hour? God forbid.

I don't particularly dislike ALT, nor do I adore Anna, but at least with her you know you're dealing with a ruthless business-oriented b*tch; you're naïve to presume she won't be the same with you. I wonder how many other of her ex-friends he watched her discard, without saying anything. It only hurts when it happens to you.

Obviously pre-ordering. I'm living for this

 

[lucy92]

Right, and how does he know that he wasn't let go because of a directive from Newhouse rather than Anna?

 

[MissMagAddict]

Here we go, again. Lol

113 minutes with André Leon Talley
From his living room in White Plains, the fashion writer on his new memoir and old friends.

André Leon Talley’s life in quarantine is not so different from the time before. He loves his house in White Plains and spends the days reading and watching Netflix in his UGG boots and trademark caftans in various shades of black and burgundy and olive green. Before our phone call, he warmed up a shepherd’s pie brought to him the night before by Alexandra Kotur, the creative director of Town & Country, which he ate on a “beautiful plate by Ralph Lauren.” He telephones regularly: Sandra Bernhard every day, Carolina Herrera every other, and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, whom he calls his “missing sister.” He refers to everyone by their full name each time so there can be no confusion. He would love to hear from Anna Wintour, but she does not call.

“This is what matters in life: how you impact people, how people are impressed by you,” he says, his voice still mellifluous with grandeur. “Did you read the letter from Ralph Lauren in the back of my book?” No matter, he’ll read it aloud. His memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, is a fiercely treasured shoe box of memories he has collected throughout his career: summering at Karl Lagerfeld’s villa in Biarritz, dancing with Diana Ross at Studio 54, attending Marc Jacobs’s wedding. It is a reminder of his own once-lofty perch at the pinnacle of high fashion as the creative director of U.S. Vogue — the first and only black person to occupy that job. “As I saw it, I was meant to be by Anna Wintour at all times and encourage her visions,” he writes. “I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision.”

Tabloids have been eager for chum, calling the book “catty” and an “extended rant” against his former boss. The people have eaten it up. To Wendy Williams, who described him as spineless, he says, “She no longer exists for me as a friend. She tears down people to build herself up.” To Ralph Rucci’s Instagram post applauding Talley’s bravery and calling Wintour satanic: It’s “a screed. S-C-R-E-E-D-I-S-H. With 12 exclamation points.” He wants the entire fashion world to know that, whatever ensuing drama the book may cause, he’s still Team Anna.

“This is not a vengeful, bitchy tell-all,” he says. He adds that he had sent Wintour the first galley and asked if she wanted anything cut. She only requested that private stories of her children be taken out and wished him well through official channels. “I will not criticize her,” Talley continues. “My book is an epistle to everyone that I love. It’s a love letter to Anna Wintour. I love her deeply.” He says “love letter” no less than a dozen times.

If anything, his writing about Wintour is the wounded cry of a company man who devoted his entire life to an institution only to get left behind. Talley remains on the masthead of Vogue as a contributing editor and receives a monthly pension from Condé Nast. (“Graydon Carter got the golden parachute,” he says of the former Vanity Fair editor. “I deserve perhaps a better pension than I have.”) But what he craves is relevance. The view from the top. Over the last two decades, he slowly receded into the background at Vogue.

He hosted the Vogue podcast (for which he was paid $500 per episode) until it disappeared without a trace; he was doing red-carpet interviews at the Met Gala until one year he wasn’t. He was less fired than simply forgotten. “No one ever took the time to send me an email or [make] a phone call,” he says. “This is what has hurt me. It makes me emotionally devastated because I could’ve walked through the arctic floes for Vogue and Anna Wintour.”

One of his favorite stories from the memory vault is how he put John Galliano on Wintour’s radar and helped save the designer’s now-infamous 1994 show staged at the São Schlumberger residence. In the book, Talley recounts being “fed up” with the lack of recognition. He writes, “It started becoming clear I’d hit a glass ceiling at Vogue. It was Anna Wintour who had officially ‘saved’ John Galliano, but I was the one on the ground, keeping the seams straight, so to speak. I had done this great job but wasn’t being treated properly or recognized for my efforts.”

I ask him how it felt to be underappreciated and about the way Wintour took credit for his work; he is immediately taken aback that I would even suggest such a thing. We both pull out the book and read the same lines out loud to each other, still arriving at vastly different conclusions. “That was not necessarily referring to Anna Wintour. Maybe that was referring to in general,” he says. “That’s a very bad reading of that.”

Talley is not a man of introspection, and one senses a danger in looking too closely. In The Chiffon Trenches, his eye is constantly trained elsewhere — on extravagances and socialites and witty bons mots — rather than on himself, in part because he sees himself as an accessory in someone else’s court. There are dramatic occurrences with little explanation: like Andy Warhol routinely grabbing Talley’s crotch, how he was quietly dismissed from the entourage of Lagerfeld’s, or why he eventually loses his position as creative director. He may describe pathological behavior, but he never calls it that. An orange is not necessarily an orange.

Race looms uncomfortably in the periphery. In the years since his 2018 documentary, The Gospel According to André, Talley has been game to discuss the more overt forms of racism he has experienced, like how Clara Saint, a publicist at YSL, allegedly called him “Queen Kong” behind his back. It is the racism from those he calls his friends that places him at a loss.

Take, for instance, his description of Loulou de la Falaise, a French socialite and Yves Saint Laurent muse. In The Chiffon Trenches, she is one of his favorite dancing partners at Studio 54, and he writes of her glamorous, scandalous wedding to Thadée Klossowski, the son of the painter Balthus. There is no mention of the moment that caps off Hilton Als’s devastating 1994 New Yorker profile of Talley, “The Only One,” in which the same Loulou de la Falaise calls him a “n—– dandy” at a luncheon to the apparent laughter of fellow attendees, including Talley himself.

“That profile does not exist in the universe in which I walk,” Talley says. “This writer does not exist. He got it wrong.”

“So she never said that?” I ask.

“Loulou was one of my greatest friends. A dear loyal friend,” he replies. “She could have said it, but for her, that was not racist to say what she said. I will not repeat it. But it did not come from a place of racism.”

Talley pauses. “I see you’ve done your homework,” he says, the same advice he gives to young people looking to break into the fashion world. “You went back trying to get the dark parts. Keep going, keep going.”

On some level, he recognizes that he has compartmentalized racism but is unwilling, or simply unable, to stop.

There are moments in the book where he stands at the threshold of revelation: The Chiffon Trenches is the first time he was able to admit he was sexually abused as a child and that it stunted his ability to form romantic relationships. He sees his subsequent career as one of transcendence, of containing the dark parts and putting on a glamorous face. “I just kept going,” he says. “My career was important. I kept getting up every day and doing what I had to do.”

As for the future, Talley will carry forth: He plans to launch a fragrance called Moiré Noir. He would love to adapt his life for the screen. And yes, even as the pandemic is wreaking unforeseeable change upon the fashion world, he would return to Vogue in a heartbeat if Wintour asked him to. “Of course,” he says. “But she never will.”
source | nymag

 

[MissMagAddict]

Take, for instance, his description of Loulou de la Falaise, a French socialite and Yves Saint Laurent muse. In The Chiffon Trenches, she is one of his favorite dancing partners at Studio 54, and he writes of her glamorous, scandalous wedding to Thadée Klossowski, the son of the painter Balthus. There is no mention of the moment that caps off Hilton Als’s devastating 1994 New Yorker profile of Talley, “The Only One,” in which the same Loulou de la Falaise calls him a “n—– dandy” at a luncheon to the apparent laughter of fellow attendees, including Talley himself.

The Only One
By Hilton Als

New Yorker, 1994

One night last spring, the fashion editor André Leon Talley attended an all-made nude review at the Gaiety Theatre, on West Forty-sixth Street. He was dressed in a red waist-length military jacket with gold epaulets and black cuffs, black military trousers with a gold stripe down each leg, black patent-leather pumps with grosgrain bows, gray silk socks with black ribbing, white gloves, and a faux-fur muff. Accompanying him, rather like another accessory, was the young English designer John Galliano.

As the driver opened the car door in front of the theatre, Talley, characteristically, issued a directive followed by a question: “I shall expect you here upon my return at once! Lord, child, how am I gonna get out of this car in all this drag?” He did not pause for an answer. He stretched out this long left leg, placed his foot on the sidewalk, and, grabbing the back of the driver’s seat, hoisted himself up and out—a maneuver whose inelegance he countered by adjusting his muff with a flourish.

Appearances are significant to André Leon Talley, who seeks always to live up to the grand amalgamation of his three names. He has sienna-brown skin and slightly graying close-cropped hair. He is six feet seven and has large hands and large feet and a barrel chest. He has been described as “a big girl.” He is gap-toothed and full-mouthed. His speech combines and old-school Negro syntax, French words (for sardonic emphasis), and a posh British accent. Though a wide audience may know him from his periodic television appearances on CNN and VH1, it is in the world of magazines that he has made his name. Currently the creative director of Vogue, formerly the creative director ofHG and a writer, stylist, and photographer for Women’s Wear Daily, Interview, and theTimes Magazine. André Leon Talley is, at forty-six, fashion’s most voluble arbiter, custodian, and promoter of glamour.

Inside the Gaiety—a small, dark space with a stage, a movie screen, and two tiers of seats—some men sat in various states of undress and arousal while others dozed off quietly. Talley and Galliano stood in the middle of the aisle to the left of the stage and waited for the for dancers to appear. Talley was hoping for a “moment.” He finds moments in other people’s impulses (“I can tell you were about to have a moment”), work (“What Mr. Lagerfeld and I were after in those photographs was a moment”), architecture (“This room could use a certain…moment”), social gatherings (“These people are having a moment”). When the dancers entered, one by one, Talley said, “This is a major moment, child.” Swaying to loud disco music against a backdrop of gold lamé, the young men, who were either nude or partly so, offered the men in the front row a thigh to be touched, a biceps to be rubbed.

“Ooh!” Talley exclaimed. “It’s nostalgie de la boue! It’s ‘Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,’ no? Manet. The flesh. The young men. The languorous fall and gall of the flesh to dare itself to fall onthe herbe.” André Leon Talley came down hard on the word herbe as he caught sight of a lavishly tanned young man onstage who was naked except for cowboy boots and, as his smile revealed, a retainer. “What can one do?” Talley moaned. “What can one do with such piquant insouciance? How can one live without the vitality of the cowboy boots and teeth and retainers and so forth?”

Before the end of the performance, Talley led Galliano into a room on one side of the theatre, where several other men were waiting for dancers. Upon identifying André Leon Talley as “That fashion man off the TV,” a black drag queen, who wore jeans, a cream-colored halter top, and an upswept hairdo, and sat on the lap of a bespectacled older white man, said, “That’s what I want you to make me feel like, baby, a white woman. A white woman who’s getting out of your Mercedes-Benz and going into Gucci to buy me some new drawers because you wrecked them. Just fabulous.”

“This is charming,” Talley said, calling attention to a makeshift bar with bowls of pretzels and potato chips and fruit punch. “For the guests who have come to pay homage to the breathtaking ability of the personnel.” His muff grazed the top of the potato chips.

The room contained framed photographs from Madonna’s book “Sex,” which depicted scenes of louche S & M violence (Madonna, in an evening dress being abused, nude dancers with collars, being ridden by Daniel de La Falaise in a dinner jacket). The scenes had been enacted and photographed at the Gaiety. “Miss Ciccone,” Talley said, with disdain, barely looking at the photographs. “My dear, we do not discuss the vulgar.”

In inspecting and appraising his surroundings, André Leon Talley was working–the creative director in pursuit of inspiration. It is the same sort of work he does in the more conventional environs of his working day. At Vogue, Talley is many things–art director, stylist, fashion writer, and producer. As a producer, Talley suggests unlikely combinations, hoping for interesting results. Recently, he arranged to have Camilla Nickerson, a young fashion editor at Vogue and a proponent of the glamour-misshapen-by-irony look, design a photo spread on Geoffrey Beene, a designer committed to glamour not misshapen by anything. As an art director, Talley from time to time oversees cover shoots, especially those involving celebrities. He tries to insure that the photographer will produce an image that makes both the clothes and the celebrity look appealing and provides enough clear space in the frame for the magazine’s art director to strip in cover lines. At the same time, Talley encourages the celebrity to project the kind of attitude that Vogue seeks to promote on its covers: relaxed and elegant but accessible. He does so by acting as both therapist and stylist. He soothes his subjects’ anxieties about the cover shoot by exclaiming, as he dresses them, that this or that garment has never looked better.

It is in the production of stories he conceives on his own that Talley employs all his talents simultaneously. Before a season’s new designer collections are shown to the press, Talley visits various houses to look for recurring motifs, in order to build a story around them. During a recent season, he discerned that two or three collections featured lace.Vogue then devised a story based on the mystery of lace, and had Helmut Newton photograph lace gloves, lace boots, and lace bodices in a way that enhanced the mystery. Talley chose which details of the clothes should be photographed. In conjunction with Newton, he also chose the models, the hair-and-makeup people, and the locations.

Talley will sometimes write the text to accompany the fashion spread he has conceived. At other times, he will act simply as a cultural reporter, writing pieces on new designers and choosing the best examples of their work to be photographed. Talley has written on interiors, too, directing the photographer to capture images that complement his text. “My dear, an editor must, must be there to fluff the pillows!” he says, explaining his presence at photo shoots.

André Leon Talley’s office at Vogue in Paris, where he is based, is a high-ceilinged space, painted white, with large windows facing the Boulevard Saint-Germain; it is surprisingly bare, except for two desks and many photographs on the walls, including a large one in color by Karl Lagerfeld of Talley carrying a big fur muff. There Talley will sometimes perform a kind of boss-man theatre–throw papers about, slam telephones down, noisily expel the incompetent. “This is too much. What story do we need to be working on, children? What story? Let’s get cracking, darlings, on fur. Fuh, fuh, fuh. One must set the mood around the fuh and the heels, the hair, the skin, the nipples under thefuh, the hair around the nipples, the fuh clinging to the nipples, sweat, oysters, champagne, régence!” He conveys not only dissatisfaction but also the promise that, once he is satisfied, his reflexive endearments (“darling,” “child,” and so forth) will be heartfelt.

André Leon Talley, in a blue pin-striped suit, walked in his office one day making several demands that could not be met, since his assistant was not there to meet them. That Talley had, an hour before, dismissed his assistant for the day was a fact he chose to ignore. He say at his desk and began upsetting papers on it—papers that had clearly been left in some order. He then companied about the lack of order. He complained about the lack of a witness to the lack of order. He summoned by intercom a young woman named Georgie Newbery, an assistant in the fashion department, to be such a witness.

“Georgie!” Talley exclaimed as she quietly entered the room. Her eyes were focused on Talley, who, as a result of the attention, seemed to grow larger. “I told Sam never, nevah to leave my desk in this state of…disorder! I can’t find my papers.”

“What papers, André ?” Newbery asked.

“The papers, darling! The papers! I need a telephone number on the…papers! Can you believe this, child?” Talley asked of no one in particular. “I need the number of the soiree, darling,” he said, slumping in a caricature of weariness. He covered his face with his hands and moaned. Newbery picked a piece of paper off his assistant’s desk and handed it to him. Talley seemed dissatisfied at having the phone number, the problem solved, the event over. He paused, as if to consider the next event he would create. Looking up at Newbery, Talley said, “Georgie, I need three thousand francs! At once!”

André Leon Talley has been the creative director of Vogue for six years. During that time, he has seen many looks come and go–the grunge look, the schoolgirl look, the sex-kitten look, the New Romantic look, the reconstituted-hippie look, the athletic-wear-meets-the-street look. In the years I have known him, though, Talley’s own look has consistently been one of rigourous excess. In his way, he has become the last editorial custodian of unfettered glamour, and the only fashion editor who figures at all in the popular imagination. He is the fashion editor who, seemingly sparing no expense for models, clothes, props, photographers, and airplane tickets to far-flung locations–a farm in Wales, a burlesque house on West Forty-sixth–pursues that which the public will perceive, without naming it, as allure.

This pursuit begins in Talley’s Paris apartment, which is situated near the Invalides, where Napoleon is entombed. The apartment is small but rich in talismans of allure: scented candles, flower-patterned draperies that puddle on the floor, a large flower-patterned screen, a Regency bed, books artfully arranged on a table in the vestibule. The walls are covered in beige rice paper. There is a small dark room off the vestibule with a VCR attached to an oversized television; on the walls are a number of drawings by Karl Lagerfeld and a poster-size, black-and-white photograph of a black man’s torso by Annie Leibovitz.

Talley begins telephoning in the morning, often as early as six o’clock, to suss out what might be “the next thing.” When Talley telephones a designer, he may ask, “Darling, have you had a moment?” In an industry notoriously suspicious of language, Talley’s grandiloquence transports the designer into the role of artist. It does so by placing the designer’s work in the realm of the historic: “This collection is more diving than the last, Monsieur Ferree, in that it is a high moment of Grecian simplicity, of fluted skirts in the material of a high rustling mega-moment, from room to room, a la the essence of King Louis XV, a la the true spirit of couture!”

On the other hand, Talley does not see the work without the frame of commerce around it; in this sense, he is like an art dealer, whose survival is based on an evaluation of the market and how the work at hand will shape the market, or be shaped by it, in future months. When Chanel, Dior, de la Renta, and other couture and ready-to-wear house advertise in Vogue, they signal the affinity between their aesthetic and the world that André Leon Talley has created. Designers trust him, and the women’s husbands trust him with their wives. Drawing on this fund of trust, Talley presents, in the pages of Vogue, the work of European designers in an atmosphere or guilt-free exuberance that an American audience, standing in line at the supermarket reading Vogue, can trust.

“Magazines are not a Diderot moment of oeuvreness,” Talley says. “They are monthly ventures that should amuse and earn money by showing how kind money can be.” In the stories that Talley has produced for Vogue in recent years—”The Armani Edge,” “Feets of Brilliance,” “Which Way Couture?,” and “The Couture Journals,” among others—everything is seduction. Talley’s delicate orchestration and manipulation of the designers and buyers and photographers and editorial staff contributing to his vision are never seen, of course. What matters most to André Leon Talley is the image in his head of a woman looking at the page and imagining herself on it, unaware of all that André Leon Talley has contributed to her imagination.

André Leon Talley says he owes his desire to uphold what he calls “the world of opulence! opulence! opulence! maintenance! maintenance! maintenance!” to the late Diana Vreeland, who was the fashion editor for twenty-five years at Harper’s Bazaar, the editor-in-chief of Vogue for eight years, and thereafter a special consultant to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute, where she mounted audacious shows on Balenciaga, the eighteenth-century woman, equestrian fashion, and Yves Saint Laurent. It was during Vreeland’s planning and installation of one such show—”Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design,” in 1974—that Talley and Vreeland first met, through the parents of one of his college classmates. He later came to work for her as an unpaid assistant.

Vreeland was the most recognizable person in the fashion industry–indeed, the very image of the fashion editor–with her heavily rouged cheeks and lips, red fingernails, and sleek black hair; her red environments; her pronouncements (bluejeans “are the most beautiful things since the gondola”; Brigitte Bardot’s “lips made Mick Jagger’s lipspossible”); her credos (“Of course, you understand I’m looking for the most far-fetchedperfection”; “There’s nothing more boring than narcissism—the tragedy of being totally…me”); her standards (having her paper money ironed, the soles of her shoes bugged with rhinoceros horn); and her extravagance of vision (photographic emphasis on nudity, drugs, and jewels).

By the time they met, Talley had gradually constructed a self that was recognizably a precursor of the André Leon Talley of today. And its most influential component was the formidable chic of his maternal grandmother. Talley was born in Washington, D.C., and when he was two months old he was sent by his parents to live with his grandmother Bennie Frances Davis, in Durham, North Carolina. “An extraordinary woman with blue hair, like Elsie de Wolfe” is how he describes her. “You know what one fundamental difference between whites and blacks is? If there’s trouble at home for white people, they send the child to a psychiatrist. Black folks just send you to live with Grandma.”

As a teenager, Talley made regular trips to the white section of Durham to buy Vogue, and these forays were another significant influence on his development. “My uncles cried ‘Scandal! Scandal!’ when I said I wanted to grow up to be a fashion editor,” he says. “I discovered so early that the world was cruel. My mother didn’t like my clothes. Those white people in Durham were so awful. And there I was, just this lone *******…creature. And fashion in Vogue seemed so kind. So opulently kind. A perfect image of things. I began to think like an editor when I began to imagine presenting the women I knew in the pages of Vogue: my grandmother’s style of perfection in the clothes she made; her version of couture.”

In a snapshot of Talley from his college days, he is sitting with two female friends. What makes him recognizable is not just his physical appearance–the long thin body; the large, vulnerable mouth jutting out from the long, thin face–but also his clothes. Unlike the other students, who are dressed in T-shirts and jeans, Talley wears a blue sweater with short sleeves over a white shirt with long sleeves, a brooch in the shape of a crescent moon, large aviator glasses with yellow lenses, and a blue knit hat. He looks delighted to be wearing these clothes. He looks delighted to be with these women.

Talley earned a B.A. in French literature at North Carolina Central University in 1970. His interest in the world of allure outside his grandmother’s closet, away from Durham, coincided with his interest in French. He says of his discovery that couture was a part of French culture, and that his grandmother practiced her version of it, “You could have knocked me over with a feather! And it was stretching all the way back to the ancien régime darling! Introduced to my by my first French instructor, Miss Cynthia P. Smith, in the fields of Durham, North Carolina! The entire French oeuvre of oldness and awfulness flipping one out into the Belle Époque bodice of the music hall, Toulouse-Lautrec, an atmosphere of decadence, leading us to Josephine Baker and…me!”

Talley’s immersion in French gave him a model to identify with: Baudelaire, on whose work he wrote his master’s thesis, at Brown University in the early seventies. And it was while he was at Brown, liberated by the Baudelairean image of the flaneur, that Talley began to exercise full his penchant for extravagant personal dress. He was known for draping himself in a number of cashmere sweaters. He was known for buying, on his teaching-assistant stipend, Louis Vuitton luggage.

“Obviously, he was not going to teach French,” Dr. Yvonne Cormier, a schoolmate of Talley’s at Brown, says. “André thought it was just good manners to look wonderful. It was a moral issue. And his language reflected that. André could never just go to his room and study. He had to exclaim, ‘They’ve sent me to this prison! Now I have to go to my chambers and have a moment.’”

After Talley left Brown and completed his stint as a volunteer with Diana Vreeland at the Met, he became known in New York fashion circles for these things: insisting, at his local post office, on the most beautiful current stamps and holding up the line until they materialized; serving as a personal shopper for Miles Davis at the request of Davis’s companion, Cicely Tyson; answering the telephone at Andy Warhol’s Interview, his capacity as a receptionist, with a jaunty “Bonjour!” and taking down messages in purple ink (for bad news) and gold (good news); wearing a pith helmet and kneesocks in the summer; being referred to by the envious as Queen Kong; becoming friends with the heiress Doris Duke and attending, at her invitation, many of her appearances as a singer with a black gospel choir; overspending on clothes and furnishings and running up personal debts in his habitual effort to live up to the grand amalgamation of his three names.

The late seventies, when André Leon Talley came into his own, is the period when designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Halston produced the clothes that Talley covered at the beginning of his career as a fashion editor at WWD, clothes often described as glamorous. It is the period referred to in the clothes being produced now by designers like Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui. “It was a time when I could take Mrs. Vreeland and Lee Radziwill to a LaBelle concert at the Beacon and it wouldn’t look like I was about to mug them,” Talley says.

Daniela Morera, a correspondent for Italian Vogue, has a different recollection. “André was privileged because he was a close friend of Mrs. Vreeland’s,” she says. “Black people were as segregated in the industry then as they are now. They’ve always been the don’t-get-too-close-darling exotic. André enjoyed a lot of attention from whites because he was ambitious and amusing. He says it wasn’t bad, because he didn’t know how bad it was for other blacks in the business. He was successful because he wasn’t a threat. He’ll never be an editor-in-chief. How could America have that dictating what the women of America will wear? Or representing them? No matter that André ’s been the greatest crossover act in the industry for quite some time. Like forever.”

Talley’s fascination stems, in part, from his being the only one. In the media or the arts, the only one is usually male, always somewhat “colored,” and almost always gay. His career is based, in varying degrees, on talent, race, nonsexual charisma, and an association with people in power. To all appearances, the only one is a person with power, but is not the power. He is not defined but controlled by a professional title, because he believes in the importance of his title and of the power with which is associates him. If he is black, he is a symbol of white anxiety about his presence in the larger world and the guilt such anxiety provokes. Other anxieties preoccupy him: anxieties about salary and prestige and someone else’s opinion ultimately being more highly valued than his. He elicits many emotions from his colleagues, friendship and loyalty rarely being among them, since he does not believe in friendship that is innocent of an interest in what his title can do.

Talley is positioned, uniquely, at the intersection of fashion, magazine publishing, television, and high society. He regards his position as a privilege, and he flaunts it. “A large point of his life is Vogue,” Candy Pratts Price, the magazine’s fashion director, says about him. “Which explains the vulnerable, intense moods he goes through when he things someone here is against him. We’ve all been there with those moods of his, andthere is pretty intense.”

Talley’s emotional involvement with women rises in part from nostalgia. He seems to project his grandmother’s intentions and concerns for him, and Cynthia P. Smith’s and Diana Vreeland’s as well, onto his female colleagues at Vogue, and he seems to feel spurned when they exercise the independence inherent in a modern-day professional relationship. Often, the results are disastrous. When Talley is in favor, his colleagues adopt him as a totem of editorial success; when his is not, they regard him as a glittering but superfluous accessory.

His interest in romance is nostalgic, too. For him, romance is not about ending his loneliness; rather, it flows from the idea, expounded by Baudelaire, that love is never truly attained, only yearned for. (Talley’s contemporary version of this: “No man, child,” he might say, telephoning from his apartment in Paris. “No man. Just another video evening alone for the child of culture.”) Talley’s romantic yearnings are melancholic: he is susceptible to the prolonged, unrequited “crush” but is immune to involvement. He avoids engaging men he is attracted to. Generally, he is attracted to men who avoid him. He avoids the potential rejection and hurt that are invariable aspects of romantic love. Going to a gay bar with Talley, then, is an odd experience. In gay bars, as a rule, all bets are off: everyone is the same as everyone else because everyone is after the same thing. In a sense, the common pursuit divests everyone present of his title. Talley rarely speaks to anyone in this sort of environment. Mostly, he glowers at men he finds appealing and lays the blame for their lack of immediate interest in him on racism, or on the sexually paranoid environment that AIDS has fostered everywhere. Perhaps he just prefers the imager of love made familiar by fashion magazines: images of the subject exhausted by “feeling,” undone by crush, recuperating in an atmosphere of glamour and allure.

Once, in New York, I had dinner with Talley and his friend the comedian Sandra Bernhard. She asked me how long I had known André . I said, “I fell in love with him in Paris,” There was silence—a silence that André did not fill with being pleased at or made shy by my comment. He grew large in his seat. He grew very dark and angry. And then he exclaimed, with great force, “You did not fall in love with me! You were in love with Paris! It was all the fabulous things I showed you in Paris! Lagerfeld’s house! Dior! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t! It was Paris!”

When I first met Talley, I did not tell him that my interest in him was based in part on what other blacks in the fashion industry had said about him, on the way they had pointed him out as the only one. Blacks in the fashion industry have spoken of Talley with varying degrees of reverence, envy, and mistrust (which is how non-blacks in the fashion industry have spoken of him as well). One black American designer has called André Leon Talley “a fool. He’ll only help those kids—designers like Galliano—if they’ve got social juice, if they’re liked by socialites, the women who tell André what to do.” Talley complains about people who underestimate the difficulty of his position. “It’s exhausting to be the only one with the access, the influence, to prevent the children from looking like jigaboos in the magazine—when they do appear in the magazine. It’s lonely.”

Talley gave a luncheon in Paris a few years ago to celebrate the couture season’s start. The people he welcomed to the luncheon—held in the Café Flore’s private dining room, on the second floor—included Kenneth Jay Lane, a jewelry designer; Inès de la Fressange, a former Chanel model and spokesperson; Joe Eula, a fashion illustrator; Roxanne Lowitt, a photographer; and Maxime de la Falaise, a fashion doyenne, and her daughter, LouLou, the Yves Saint Laurent muse.

Following shirred eggs and many bottles of wine, Roxanne Lowitt, her black hair and black Chinese jacket a blur of organization, invited the guests to assemble in order to be photographed. LouLou de la Falaise removed an ancient huge round compact from her purse and began to powder her nose as her mother sat in readiness. Joe Eula ignored Lowitt and continued drinking. Talley got up from his seat to sit near Maxime de la Falaise, who had admired a large turquoise ring he wore.

“Look, LouLou!” Talley shouted. “The color of this ring is divine, no? Just like the stone you gave me!”

“What?” LouLou de La Falaise asked, barely disguising her boredom.

“This ring, child. Just like the stone you gave me, no?”

LouLou de La Falaise did not respond. She nodded toward Roxanne Lowitt, and Lowitt instructed her to stand behind Maxime de La Falaise and Talley. LouLou de La Falaise said, “I will stand there only if André tries not to look like such a ****** dandy.”

Several people laughed, loudly. None louder than André Leon Talley. But it seemed to me that a couple of things happened before he started laughing: he shuttered his eyes, his grin grew larger, and his back went rigid, as he saw his belief in the durability of glamour and allure shatter before him in a million glistening bits. Talley attempted to pick those pieces up. He sighed, then stood and said, “Come on, children. Let’s see something. Let’s visit the house of Galliano.”
source | newyorker

 

[Benn98]

LOL. Alexandra Kotur's name just got added to Anna's Burn Book. Not only does she consort with the enemy, but she also feeds him carbs! But what about the others? Carolina Herrera? She would still need advertising, support from Herrera. Maybe it will be like Valentino who was the only designer to help with the making of The Devil Wears Prada. He came away unscathed.

Will say it again, the more I read these ALT pieces the clearer a picture is being drawn of him. You can't help but feel sad for the guy. I believe the LouLou debacle took place, purely going by how vehemently he's denying it, and that's really tragic in a way. For someone to say something so deplorable to/about a 'friend', especially in a drunken state, must mean they've always thought it when sober. And suddenly it makes sense why ALT would never have been a forerunner to Edward Enninful. Not only is he from an era that didn't use identity politics to make fashion more attractive, but it seems he himself can't shake the idea that he never quite got a seat at the table. The constant validation, the name dropping, the need to write this book is proof not only to the rest of the world but also to himself that he did. He's the very first black guy who had it all. How could anyone have ever expected him to champion diversity for others if his own position in the system was shaky at best?

It sounds a crude thing to say, but it seems this is the end of the line for him. You don't write a book like this if you still plan on working in fashion even in a lesser capacity that would be outside Anna's reach. If he doesn't seek counselling, he will die like Maria Callas, of a broken heart. Sorry, MMA!

 

[MissMagAddict]

If he doesn't seek counselling, he will die like Maria Callas, of a broken heart. Sorry, MMA!

No need to be sorry. I just post the sh!t.
When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I'm slipping. —Maria Callas

 

[dsamg]

Here we go, again. Lol

113 minutes with André Leon Talley
From his living room in White Plains, the fashion writer on his new memoir and old friends.

André Leon Talley’s life in quarantine is not so different from the time before. He loves his house in White Plains and spends the days reading and watching Netflix in his UGG boots and trademark caftans in various shades of black and burgundy and olive green. Before our phone call, he warmed up a shepherd’s pie brought to him the night before by Alexandra Kotur, the creative director of Town & Country, which he ate on a “beautiful plate by Ralph Lauren.” He telephones regularly: Sandra Bernhard every day, Carolina Herrera every other, and Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, whom he calls his “missing sister.” He refers to everyone by their full name each time so there can be no confusion. He would love to hear from Anna Wintour, but she does not call.

“This is what matters in life: how you impact people, how people are impressed by you,” he says, his voice still mellifluous with grandeur. “Did you read the letter from Ralph Lauren in the back of my book?” No matter, he’ll read it aloud. His memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, is a fiercely treasured shoe box of memories he has collected throughout his career: summering at Karl Lagerfeld’s villa in Biarritz, dancing with Diana Ross at Studio 54, attending Marc Jacobs’s wedding. It is a reminder of his own once-lofty perch at the pinnacle of high fashion as the creative director of U.S. Vogue — the first and only black person to occupy that job. “As I saw it, I was meant to be by Anna Wintour at all times and encourage her visions,” he writes. “I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision.”

Tabloids have been eager for chum, calling the book “catty” and an “extended rant” against his former boss. The people have eaten it up. To Wendy Williams, who described him as spineless, he says, “She no longer exists for me as a friend. She tears down people to build herself up.” To Ralph Rucci’s Instagram post applauding Talley’s bravery and calling Wintour satanic: It’s “a screed. S-C-R-E-E-D-I-S-H. With 12 exclamation points.” He wants the entire fashion world to know that, whatever ensuing drama the book may cause, he’s still Team Anna.

“This is not a vengeful, bitchy tell-all,” he says. He adds that he had sent Wintour the first galley and asked if she wanted anything cut. She only requested that private stories of her children be taken out and wished him well through official channels. “I will not criticize her,” Talley continues. “My book is an epistle to everyone that I love. It’s a love letter to Anna Wintour. I love her deeply.” He says “love letter” no less than a dozen times.

If anything, his writing about Wintour is the wounded cry of a company man who devoted his entire life to an institution only to get left behind. Talley remains on the masthead of Vogue as a contributing editor and receives a monthly pension from Condé Nast. (“Graydon Carter got the golden parachute,” he says of the former Vanity Fair editor. “I deserve perhaps a better pension than I have.”) But what he craves is relevance. The view from the top. Over the last two decades, he slowly receded into the background at Vogue.

He hosted the Vogue podcast (for which he was paid $500 per episode) until it disappeared without a trace; he was doing red-carpet interviews at the Met Gala until one year he wasn’t. He was less fired than simply forgotten. “No one ever took the time to send me an email or [make] a phone call,” he says. “This is what has hurt me. It makes me emotionally devastated because I could’ve walked through the arctic floes for Vogue and Anna Wintour.”

One of his favorite stories from the memory vault is how he put John Galliano on Wintour’s radar and helped save the designer’s now-infamous 1994 show staged at the São Schlumberger residence. In the book, Talley recounts being “fed up” with the lack of recognition. He writes, “It started becoming clear I’d hit a glass ceiling at Vogue. It was Anna Wintour who had officially ‘saved’ John Galliano, but I was the one on the ground, keeping the seams straight, so to speak. I had done this great job but wasn’t being treated properly or recognized for my efforts.”

I ask him how it felt to be underappreciated and about the way Wintour took credit for his work; he is immediately taken aback that I would even suggest such a thing. We both pull out the book and read the same lines out loud to each other, still arriving at vastly different conclusions. “That was not necessarily referring to Anna Wintour. Maybe that was referring to in general,” he says. “That’s a very bad reading of that.”

Talley is not a man of introspection, and one senses a danger in looking too closely. In The Chiffon Trenches, his eye is constantly trained elsewhere — on extravagances and socialites and witty bons mots — rather than on himself, in part because he sees himself as an accessory in someone else’s court. There are dramatic occurrences with little explanation: like Andy Warhol routinely grabbing Talley’s crotch, how he was quietly dismissed from the entourage of Lagerfeld’s, or why he eventually loses his position as creative director. He may describe pathological behavior, but he never calls it that. An orange is not necessarily an orange.

Race looms uncomfortably in the periphery. In the years since his 2018 documentary, The Gospel According to André, Talley has been game to discuss the more overt forms of racism he has experienced, like how Clara Saint, a publicist at YSL, allegedly called him “Queen Kong” behind his back. It is the racism from those he calls his friends that places him at a loss.

Take, for instance, his description of Loulou de la Falaise, a French socialite and Yves Saint Laurent muse. In The Chiffon Trenches, she is one of his favorite dancing partners at Studio 54, and he writes of her glamorous, scandalous wedding to Thadée Klossowski, the son of the painter Balthus. There is no mention of the moment that caps off Hilton Als’s devastating 1994 New Yorker profile of Talley, “The Only One,” in which the same Loulou de la Falaise calls him a “n—– dandy” at a luncheon to the apparent laughter of fellow attendees, including Talley himself.

“That profile does not exist in the universe in which I walk,” Talley says. “This writer does not exist. He got it wrong.”

“So she never said that?” I ask.

“Loulou was one of my greatest friends. A dear loyal friend,” he replies. “She could have said it, but for her, that was not racist to say what she said. I will not repeat it. But it did not come from a place of racism.”

Talley pauses. “I see you’ve done your homework,” he says, the same advice he gives to young people looking to break into the fashion world. “You went back trying to get the dark parts. Keep going, keep going.”

On some level, he recognizes that he has compartmentalized racism but is unwilling, or simply unable, to stop.

There are moments in the book where he stands at the threshold of revelation: The Chiffon Trenches is the first time he was able to admit he was sexually abused as a child and that it stunted his ability to form romantic relationships. He sees his subsequent career as one of transcendence, of containing the dark parts and putting on a glamorous face. “I just kept going,” he says. “My career was important. I kept getting up every day and doing what I had to do.”

As for the future, Talley will carry forth: He plans to launch a fragrance called Moiré Noir. He would love to adapt his life for the screen. And yes, even as the pandemic is wreaking unforeseeable change upon the fashion world, he would return to Vogue in a heartbeat if Wintour asked him to. “Of course,” he says. “But she never will.”
source | nymag

Where do you start with this? The constant full name dropping and pathological need for validation? The fact he feels he has faced the biggest injustice on this planet by being dropped by Vogue when he still receives a monthly pension for a job he does not even do (have never heard of this in any job ever?!). He comes off worse with every interview. I truly feel for the racism and abuse he has faced, and it saddens me to believe it has made him feel so inferior and worthless that he has been in denial about it most of his life. But at his age particularly I cannot understand this truly exhausting need for constant attention. Hard to believe there is someone who thinks it is appropriate to act so entitled and out of touch at this time.

 

[dodencebt]

Here comes Vanessa!

André Leon Talley’s Tales From the Dark Side
The juiciest fashion memoir of the year is out. But is it a tell-all, a tragedy or a harbinger of things to come?


There is a scene in “The September Issue,” the 2009 movie by R. J. Cutler about the making of the biggest Vogue of the year, that features the magazine’s then editor at large, André Leon Talley, huffing his way around a tennis court with a Louis Vuitton tennis racket case, Louis Vuitton tennis towel, Louis Vuitton beanie hat and Louis Vuitton sports bag.

It is eerily reminiscent of a scene from “High Anxiety,” the 1977 movie by Mel Brooks, which features its star, Madeline Kahn, wearing a Louis Vuitton-inspired jumpsuit, getting out of a Louis Vuitton-inspired car. The Brooks film, however, is a satire; the Cutler film, a documentary.

Which is to say: In fashion, the difference between fact and fantasy often seems to come down to what you call it. Or how you see it. That shifting line is part of why it’s such a compelling avatar for our ambitions and identities. Ofttimes you have to dress the part and pretend before you play the part.

This is never more apparent than in two new books: one from Mr. Talley himself, and one from Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue for 25 years. “The Chiffon Trenches,” Mr. Talley’s book, has had gossip and power brokers salivating since excerpts taking aim at his former employer, the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, leaked a few weeks ago.

But really, how to see them?

Though both books are officially memoirs, they are more like historical documents, chronicles of a world that was already on the fade but, post-Covid-19, will be changed forever — if it survives at all.

“The Chiffon Trenches” has been sold as a juicy tell-all about two of the towering figures of 20th-century fashion: Ms. Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer who died in 2019; revenge p*rn in written form. It is that, kind of. But it is also a bildungsroman about an African-American boy from the Jim Crow South who made it to the front row of the Parisian fashion world by way of Interview, WWD, Ebony, Vanity Fair and, above all, Vogue.

It is a tragedy: the story of how one man sold, if not his soul, then his heart, his intelligence and his body of knowledge for the sake of a suite of branded suitcases and Hilditch & Key crepe de Chine shirts. And it is a horror story, about what happens when you confuse your professional life with real life.

So come for gossip: Karl Lagerfeld was strapped to a bed as a child with leather restraints by his mother so he wouldn’t eat at night! Anna cut André out for being overweight and old (though she still invited him to her Chanel couture fittings)! Bianca Jagger traveled with custom-made Louis Vuitton hunting cases designed to hold grouse guns but long enough for her gowns! John Galliano demanded zebra rugs in his VIP dressing rooms at shows!

The book is rife with such tattletale moments about these and other characters beloved of Mr. Talley: Manolo Blahnik, Lee Radziwill, Amanda Harlech.

But stay for the truths inadvertently revealed.

(Full disclosure: I worked at Vogue for a year under Anna Wintour in the mid-90s, but did not know Mr. Talley at the time.)

It is a book full of monstrous personalities whose demands are excused by their talent. Karl Lagerfeld, for example, whom Mr. Talley venerates for his intelligence (he calls him the “Socrates of high fashion”) and his twisted generosity (he made Mr. Talley an ankle-length broadtail coat, then cast off Mr. Talley’s reciprocal gifts, and ultimately cut off anyone who dared display weakness or need).

Naomi Campbell, who treats Mr. Talley and a boyhood friend to a trip to Nigeria for the Arise Festival, to introduce a documentary that had been made on his life, thus giving Mr. Talley the gift of seeing Africa — though when it comes time to return home on Naomi’s private plane, he recounts carefully instructing his companion not to speak until spoken to (she is in a mood), a situation he seems to find completely, horrifyingly normal.

Give me economy any day.

Though Mr. Talley clearly makes an effort to wrestle with topics he spent a lot of his life not acknowledging, from all fashion’s shameful isms (sizeism, ageism — and, above all, racism, a recurring and painful through-line) to his own failed lap band surgery and inability to have a romantic relationship (he was abused as a child by a neighbor), it’s as if simply acknowledging the existence of these facts — the way they marred the otherwise gorgeous vistas of the industry as it unfurled in his mind — is enough. He never really looks at whether the rewards were worth the price exacted.

It’s hard not to think the answer is no. After all, he writes, he does not have love, but he has binge eating. You’d cry, but you know he’d be mad because you made your mascara run.

Besides, then you might miss one of the most revelatory lines in the book: the aside that Ms. Wintour “was never really passionate about clothes. Power was her passion.”

That observation gets to the essence of Mr. Talley’s role at Vogue: not just to inform and decide, but also to serve as a kind of sleight of hand: an emotive remnant of the old fashion world that was so distracting, it covered up the way the industry was evolving under Ms. Wintour’s watch into a business about money, globalization and churn.

He was the diva he wanted to be, to borrow a line from Diane von Furstenberg, complete with his own often demanding behavior, and the diva his boss needed, shaped by the divas of yore (Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol). But today fashion has no more room or patience for such divas — not in magazines or modeling or designer ateliers — and Mr. Talley has grandiosed himself out of a job.

That he doesn’t quite make this connection (or can’t bring himself to acknowledge it) while the reader can, is the festering abscess at the heart of the book.

It’s the tension between fantasy (or the world as you would like it to look) and reality, that is the essence of fashion. But perhaps the attempt to have one without the other is what it took to be him: a pioneer; the most famous black man in the glossy world — often the only black person in the room — until 2017, when Edward Enninful was appointed editor of British Vogue.

As it happens, Mr. Enninful replaced, as Mr. Talley writes, a “white woman” — Ms. Shulman, who was the editor of British Vogue from 1992 to 2017, and whose own account of her time at the magazine was released just before his. That’s pretty much where the similarities end. She was never interested in divadom; in fact, her reign was about playing the opposite part. In the pantheon of Condé Nast editors, she was the practical one, the one who didn’t drink the fantasy Kool-Aid.

Where Mr. Talley goes large, she stays small: within her own closet, quite literally. In the intro, she counts the items in her closets and drawers: 556, including 37 skirts, 12 cardigans and 37 handbags. It’s an intriguingly inside start that doesn’t really deliver.

She steers almost entirely clear of dishing on her former employer, save a note about her clothing allowance mocking her own naïveté (4,000 pounds, or roughly $4,938) and what she saw as the disappointing narrative created after she was replaced: that she had fostered a den of privileged people like her. She doesn’t tell on any of the characters she met along the way — not Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge or Richard Gere. Instead there’s a chapter on the meaning of navy, as well as her own feelings about pubic hair and wearing bikinis, even with a body that isn’t airbrushed.

If Mr. Talley was always an outsize representation of fashion’s drama, Ms. Shulman spent her time at Vogue trying to bring it down to earth, and her book continues her work, offering up an argument for clothing not as the dream, but as a repository of memory and emotion, of everyday history — cultural, social and personal. That’s a valid point. It’s just not nearly as compelling as all of the poisonous fabulosity.

And it’s the poisonous fabulosity that may represent the future: not of fashion itself, but of its storytelling. The industry’s power structures are currently buckling under the force of the pandemic, scrambling for survival, and voices that would not have dared speak up even a year ago are sensing weakness.

Not long after the first excerpts from Mr. Talley’s book appeared, the designer Ralph Rucci posted his own screed against Ms. Wintour on Instagram, promising, “I have been working on all the evil memories” and “I will write about what I had to contend with concerning this very, very meaningless person.”

Meanwhile, the current issue of the French fashion magazine Dull contains an interview with Flavien Juan Nunez, one of the winners of the 2014 LVMH Prize for fashion design school graduates, who spent a year at Dior — and who suggests in the piece that the luxury behemoth only hired him to plumb his knowledge about his previous employer, Hermès.

The previously disenfranchised and disgruntled are no longer holding their tongues (or pens). If I were a fashion power player, I’d be biting my nails. Because odds are Mr. Talley is about to be a trendsetter once more.

nytimes.com

 

[MissMagAddict]

Here comes Vanessa!

Revenge p*rn in written form.

Only four more days. We really should start a book club thread for this.

 

[Lola701]

I think I would respect Andre if he was more honest. He wanted to be part of this world for the glamour of it and enjoyed living that life of glamour. He was that skinny black guy with a good sense of style, good manners and he was interested in things that felt surprising at that time in the fashion industry. For him, working in fashion and be around those princesses, socialites, rich designers was a come up to a better lifestyle...
Because complaining about issues decades later while excusing the behavior of Loulou de la Falaise (who on the last few years of her life was like Andre) and calling the racist, Anti-Gay and women rights, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, his sister is the most confused thing I’ve ever read.
I guess, since she is an aristocrat, he doesn’t mind being the token Black Gay friend...

I’m really interested in his time at Ebony...Which is something he never talks about...And considering how little his support of black designers/stylists or photographers has been documented.

Vanessa kinda makes me reconsider Schulman. I might also read her memoirs.

 

[Kimihiro]

I’m reading the book now and honestly the amount of namedropping is nauseating.

 

[Littleathquakes]

^ why do I not find that surprising? LOL. This man has been a caricature of what it means to be a black male fashion editor ("a famine of beau-tee!").

 

[Kimihiro]

^ why do I not find that surprising? LOL. This man has been a caricature of what it means to be a black male fashion editor ("a famine of beau-tee!").

At the end I didn’t feel sorry for him. This was supposed to be about him but he chose to make it about other people. The designers, social figures, the aristocrats. There’s no breaking free, he’s still shackled to them.

You get the sense that he was just playing a role for all these people. Nothing more than a jester in court. I expected more introspection and musing from at one point the most powerful black man in fashion. Instead what I read were anecdotes about glamorous people. All spilling. Almost nothing about struggles he faced or what he thinks about the industry he is in. Not even a substantial peek at his encyclopedic knowledge in fashion, just references here and there.

 

[Lola701]

Just finished it...And what a superficial book/life.

@Kimihiro said everything right. By reading the book, I felt like he was never an actor of his own life but a spectator. The name dropping is insane and while it was fun in the beginning, it became quite annoying as through it (and the inevitable mention of all the brands he is wearing), it was clear that the highlight of his career wasn’t being the creative director of Vogue, having a power and a voice that matters in the industry, but being part of that social club and to enjoy all the advantages. It seems like all his lifestyle was funded by Karl and CN beyond what it was truly expected with his salary.

One thing the book showed was that he was indeed an influential man. His was indeed the close friend of the most powerful woman in the industry and the most powerful designer in the world. He used that influence for John Galliano and Amanda Harlech...
And when he mention race, the inevitable question is « what was your contribution? ». Is being you enough in such a long career?

Andre is a good story-teller but by making his book into a glorified gossip column, he missed the point on really showing the responsabilities and the challenges of his position. I totally miss his contribution to fashion...Beyond being himself.

And tbh, he seemed so annoying that I was reassured at my position of being Team Anna/Karl.

 

[Phuel]

^^^ He is who he is, Lola. He’s not going to change at 70.

I’ve always got the impression that he defines his worth/success/identity with all the brandnames he owns— and that includes the people. So why be annoyed that he namedrops for his book? It’s who he is. Frankly, all of us here can relate to that to a certain degree, whether we are willing to admit it or not. None of us need any of these designer clothes /bags/shoes, but here we all are— and so impassioned of it LOL It’s not that far removed from Andre’s incessant namedropping of brands.

He’s an old man now, and sadly, his mind still seems to be stuck in that perpetual state of high school pettiness where he’s BFF to the coolest and most popular girl— Anna. In so many ways , the fashion industry is high school and ruled by mean girls, where, oddly enough, the gays seem so desperate to sell their souls to be just bast in the glow of the mean girls’ presence. I sort of feel him.

 

[Lola701]

^^
I think the problem with the book is really the buzz before. I read the book knowing about his issues and ultimately, it influences the way I read it and me being annoyed by the name-dropping.

‘Andre is someone I’ve seen around and I learned more about him when YouTube was created. His personality and the name-dropping is fun when he speaks but it’s somehow quite frustrating in the book. In some cases, it’s important because it highlights his social elevation (from his first trip in unmatched luggage to the time he had an all Vuitton canine of luggage, him being around princesses and high society ladies). In other cases it feels quite superficial because there are very interesting stories in the middle that are quite short and don’t have name dropping and he goes back to his habits.

Maybe it’s better as an audio-book.

And yes, we are not far removed from Andre. Fashion is a world of frivolity and we love that. That’s why so many of us are so involved in it...And see, I found it quite funny to Know that Lee Radziwill wore clothes from Martin Grant, who is one of my favorite, discreet designer. I can use her as a name drop the next time I wear one of his clothes lol.

 

[dsamg]

Well for all my whinging about the book, I actually would like to read it. Went to order today and pre-orders are sold out at the places I looked (in Australia). Also surprised by how expensive it is; priciest biography I have seen in a while. Looks like he definitely got what he wanted - I imagine he will make a fair bit from this book.

Source: Booktopia, Dymocks

 

[Littleathquakes]

that's asking a bit much LOL. I'll just wait for the leaked chapters, or even whole book, when it comes out. Which it will.