![]() ![]() When he wasn’t in our fashion meetings pulling faces of extreme disapproval or giddy enthusiasm (he had the elastic face of a vaudeville comic), André always seemed to be somewhere thrilling, doing something thrilling. I am grateful to one of these, Riza Cruz, who joined Vogue in 2006 and recalled a classic exchange, verbatim, that I reproduce here to give a sense of life in the André lane. When the copy for his sui generis style columns arrived, it was penned (or dictated) in stream-of-consciousness Vreelandese, and a succession of very loyal copy editors fashioned it into something the general reading public might find more easily digestible. And he pushed and fought for diversity at every turn, nurturing, supporting and promoting young and established designers and models and performers of color, and making sure that they found their place in the pages of the magazine, on the runways, in the stores. Time with André was gala time he didn’t do banal. There was never, ever, a dull moment with him. His eye saw everything and his memory for the nuances of fashion’s changes through the decades was scalpel sharp. His responses to the collections could be perverse, and his was often the dissenting opinion. ![]() In fashion meetings André was highly opinionated, and loudly declamatory. André was dressed like a dandy from the Harlem Renaissance, his then somewhat willowy, imposingly towering form clad in Savile Row suits (one unforgettable beauty was fashioned by Huntsman from French navy tweed woven with a giant white windowpane check, a cloth that had originally been ordered by the Duke of Windsor) and a boater on his head-perhaps inspired by one from the fabled spring 1981 Yves Saint Laurent collection, with its parade of fabulous Black models, that André recognized as an homage to Harlem but Women’s Wear dubbed “the Jazz collection.” I was starstruck before I set eyes on him, and when I did-at the Paris haute couture collections in the early 1980s-he did not disappoint. ![]() André Leon Talley's reputation preceded him-how could it not? A swaggering fashion oracle shaped by the legendary Diana Vreeland, for whom he worked at the Costume Institute of the Met, spraying mannequins gold for “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design” and interpreting her cryptic injunctions (and to whom he later read by her bedside when her eyesight failed her, each fueled by thimblefuls of vodka), and in Warhol’s legendary Factory, and in the scrappy trenches at the Paris frontline of Women’s Wear Daily, and as the recipient of a Gatsby confetti of crepe de chine shirts from his intimate friend Karl Lagerfeld, and the confidences of Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux and Tina Chow and Paloma Picasso and Diane von Furstenberg. ![]()
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