Home
EDITOR-AT-LARGE
an essay by Orlie May-White
I am 10 years old, forcing my family to watch another fashion documentary during our Saturday movie night. This time, we are watching “The September Issue”, which documents the behind-the-scenes process of putting together the September issue of American Vogue. My eyes are glued to the screen, intently studying the world of fashion, filled with dark stares, uncomfortable clothing, and unabashed exclusivity. Three minutes into the documentary, a new character emerges. At a meeting with a makeup-free, sweatshirt-wearing Vera Wang sits Andre Leon Talley in a full suit, fur throw, and dark sunglasses. He is unlike anyone I had ever seen before. Like most of us, Andre makes small talk with his work colleagues by discussing the weather. But unlike most, Andre has a very distinctive way of discussing even the most mundane of topics.
“First of all, it has been a very bleak week this far,” Talley exclaims to Wang, “It’s been bleak-street over here in America.”
Wang tries to give Talley a high five, but he continues, “You know what, it’s a famine of beauty! My eyes are starving for beauty!”
André Leon Talley spent the 73 years of his life searching for beauty. As a six foot seven Black man with a wide frame and electrifying, boisterous laugh, this obsession and longing for beauty translates into everything he did. Talley grew up in Durham, North Carolina and was raised by his grandmother, a maid for the nearby Duke University. The racism that Talley experienced growing up amidst the Jim Crow era motivated him to look for places of escape in literature, clothing, and magazines. Talley stumbled across his first issue of Vogue in the Durham public library and was soon taken down a rabbit hole of imagination. Still, Talley knew the escapism that he found in Vogue was unable to shield him from the day to day reality of being a Black man in America. As Talley recalled in the documentary “The Gospel According to André,” after attending church one sunday afternoon as a teen, white Duke university students threw rocks at him for crossing their campus in order to buy a copy of Vogue at the local newsstand.
In school, Talley was the flamboyant closeted queer, and despite being bullied for his eclectic style, he studied hard and earned a scholarship to Brown University’s graduate program. Once he arrived at Brown, he finally found a place to dress as exquisitely as his heart desired amongst the community of art students across the street at the Rhode Island School of Design. With a diploma in French literacy and a mind filled with bombastic references to bygone high societies, he was overeducated and eager, ready to break into the industry in New York City. Talley became an unpaid volunteer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute under Diana Vreeland, the infamous and powerful editor who managed American Vogue for many decades in the 20th century. As the story goes, the fashion industry titan noticed André at work, called him into her room, and decided to take him under her wing. In 1983, André landed his first job at Vogue, which he remained professionally tethered to for the rest of his life.
Looking at André’s life as someone who was born without access, weath, white privilege, to someone who supposedly played tennis in a diamond-encrusted Piaget watch and dined at Karl Lagerfeld’s vacation home at the height of his career, one might be tempted to think that André’s life plays out like a modern day fairy tale. However, anyone equipped with even the most basic critical thinking skills from a Barnard education will be able to see that this narrative is simply a fantasy, ignoring the presence that racism and capitalism play in the fashion industry and American culture at large.
For someone whose life was defined by work, Talley’s career brought a lifestyle of in close proximity to material beauty, rather than the more substantive, soul sustaining beauty he was ultimately searching for.
As Talley recalled in an interview with Terry Gross in 2017, “I live in a gilt-plated hell.”
To reach his level of influence in fashion, Talley had to devote his entire adult life to his career. He never fell in love. He never had a long-term relationship. Further, he was never properly compensated for all of his hard work. He was paid significantly less than his white counterparts, and despite working his way into some of the most coveted rooms, parties, and runway shows, he was always working under the shadow of someone else in power. From Diana Vreeland to Anna Wintour, André was tossed around by fashion’s most coveted players but never allowed to lead any major creative projects of his own.
(Later in his life, Talley would refer to his relationship with Anna Wintour to be “parasitic”, as she had even admitted that André knew far more about fashion history than she did and yet he always remained her number two.)
Talley did what he could to bring a Black creative voice to fashion, most notably flipping racial hierarchies in a 1996 Vanity Fair cover shoot of Gone With The Wind where Black people embodied wealth and power, white people were employed as their servants, and Naomi Campbell was recast as Scarlett O’Hara. However, once he earned a reputation as a major gatekeeper in the world of fashion, he undoubtedly relished in the lavish elitism of fashion’s most exclusive circles rather than outwardly pushing for ways to dismantle its snobbish nature. (Then again, nobody else was, either.)
Talley spent his career conforming to the systemic limitations of fashion, but all of his hard work did not earn him the reputation and respect in the industry that he deserved. In recent years, Vogue decided to move in a new direction and cut ties with Talley, whose many roles were replaced by newer, younger, social media savvy characters who offered clicks and views rather than historical and technical expertise to Vogue publications. Talley died alone in a White Plains hospital earlier this year, having just settled publicized eviction charges and having been dismissed and discarded by the very institutions he upheld for most of his life.
For his name to appear in Vogue, Talley had to navigate not only the dark stares, uncomfortable clothing, and unabashed exclusivity of fashion, but also the unchartered territories of exclusion and oppression that plague access and entry into the industry for marginalized groups. His path created a unique clearing for people of color in an uphill mountain one must climb to get to the top of the fashion hierarchy. Rather than in a copy of Vogue magazine someone might find collecting dust in a public library, it will be in this group of people that Talley’s legacy will ultimately persist.
Looking back at “The September Issue‘’ documentary, in the moments before Talley is introduced, a young Ghanian-British man in thick black glasses mumbles over the phone that Anna Wintour is not satisfied with the photos of an upcoming Vogue spread. While he is not mentioned in the documentary, he is Edward Enninful, who, 8 years later, became the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, breaking racial barriers and reaching new heights that Talley was not able to achieve in his own decades-long career.
In a tribute to Talley posted on instagram, Edward worte, “R.I.P dearest André. Without you, there would be no me. Thank you for paving the way.”
