![]() Talley was intimidated by rumours suggesting he was only popular because he slept with people as a black man he was called “Queen Kong” by some. In France, his closeness to the fashion aristocracy of Yves Saint Laurent and Betty Catroux caused jealousy. ![]() He was skilled at capturing the languid sensuality of 1970s fashion, but his eye was not always appreciated. Talley rose to cover the Paris fashion shows for Women’s Wear Daily and Vogue, becoming the first African-American man to work at this level, and began wearing bespoke suits after the Duke of Windsor.įor Women’s Wear Daily, in addition to writing Talley began to style photographs. In the 1970s and 1980s, American fashion magazines were performing important work in recovering older stylistic histories and fashion narratives. ![]() Halston: The glittering rise – and spectacular fall – of a fashion icon He soaked up this world of the regulars of Studio 54, where the young man was regularly photographed with the jet set and older movie icons, whose myth Warhol foregrounded in new and unusual ways. Earning US$50 a week, he wore preppy clothes, striped shirts and tight jeans. In 1975, Talley was employed by Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. She was the perfect mentor for Talley and suffused his imagination with stories of refined luxury, fashion figures from past and present, and the sweep of world culture.ĭiana Ross and Andre Leon Talley dancing at Studio 54, New York City, circa 1979. In her second life as a curator in the Costume Institute at the Met, she pioneered a theatrical approach to fashion exhibitions in which dress was connected to epic themes. The “fashion empress”, as he called her, had been fired as editor of American Vogue (1963-1971) for her over-literary imagination and costly fashion shoots. Talley’s first fashion job was as an assistant with Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Talley went to college at the historically black university, North Carolina Central University, before completing his masters at Brown University, Rhode Island – the first in his family to attend an Ivy League School.Īt Brown he wrote his thesis on black models in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, a figure who upheld fashion as the epitome of modernity. The bright women’s clothes and careful accessories seen there were filed away mentally. ![]() Living a life like the ones I saw in the pages of Vogue, where bad things never happened.Ī regular church-goer, he later said that particular ritual was akin to going to a royal court. ![]() Most prominently, he worked at Condé Nast for four decades, where, as creative director and editor-at-large of Vogue, he shaped the way we understand and talk about fashion.īorn in Washington in 1948, Talley was raised by his modest grandmother in segregated North Carolina and graduated high school in 1966. He had a longstanding love of French culture and the cross-fertilisation of fashion, art, poetry and life. Talley, who died yesterday age 73, was a flamboyant, over-the-top figure from the fashion industry, inclined to snobbery and rather overbearing. Every time we see a “fashion moment”, we use the words of André Leon Talley, from his description of Galliano’s 1994 Japonisme show. ![]()
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