MissMagAddict
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Honestly, this is the harmless, petty tea we need during these trying times. Let the girls fight it out.
Exactly.
Honestly, this is the harmless, petty tea we need during these trying times. Let the girls fight it out.
Whew, I pre-ordered that book so damn fast because I can't wait to read the rest.
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.
If he doesn't seek counselling, he will die like Maria Callas, of a broken heart. Sorry, MMA!
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.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
nytimes.comAndré 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.
Here comes Vanessa!
Revenge p*rn in written form.
^ 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!").