Style icon: fashion expert André Leon Talley is dead

style icon
Fashion expert André Leon Talley is dead

The accessories are shrill, the floor-length kaftans are gaudy and the aisle is always regal: André Leon Talley immediately stood out on every red carpet.

The approximately two-meter-tall fashion expert, who worked for various US magazines for decades, was considered one of the world’s most influential style icons. Talley passed away on Tuesday at the age of 73.

“Talley was Vogue’s larger-than-life, longtime creative director during its rise as the fashion bible of the world,” Talley said in a statement on his official Instagram channel. His death was also consistently reported by US media, citing manager David Vigliano.

Friends with Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis

Talley is “one of the last great fashion editors with an incredible sense of fashion history,” star designer Tom Ford once told Vanity Fair. But Talley had also been severely overweight and in poor health for years, and had largely retired from the spotlight.

“My friend, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, dragged me to a doctor in Germany and he told me that I would die the next day if I didn’t change my life,” he said a few years ago Event narrated at New York’s 92Y cultural center. “Sometimes I feel like 105, but most days I feel like 25 mentally.”

In his 2020 autobiography, The Chiffon Tranches, he described himself as a “huge galleon slowly sailing into port, battered by so much fighting.” After many years in New York and Paris, Talley had moved to the country, to an estate in the posh New York suburb of White Plains, where he gardened “under supervision” and found space for all his treasures. “My sheets were $3,000 and three of my bedrooms are actually dressing rooms full of clothes. But I know where each piece is.” He has never been able to handle money. “I only know how to spend it.”

The African American was born in 1948 and grew up in the US state of North Carolina. “As soon as I was born, my parents took me to my grandmother’s house and I never left her house,” Talley once said. “My parents were very young and had great problems making ends meet.” Talley adored his grandmother, who also taught him fashion sense. “As a teenager, I bought Vogue for the first time, which was the greatest luxury for me.”

Andy Warhol’s assistant

Talley studied French in North Carolina and then moved to New York. He worked with the former “Vogue” boss Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum and quickly got to know the scene of the metropolis. “I was at the first and last party at Studio 54.” He switched to “Interview” magazine, became Andy Warhol’s personal assistant and went out with him and his gang every night while still living unglamorously in the YMCA student hostel. Vreeland remained his best friend until her death in 1989. He often visited her in her luxury apartment on Park Avenue and read to her. “Then she and my grandmother died in the same year. That was very hard for me.” These two women made him the man he became.

Talley worked in Paris and New York for various fashion magazines and interviewed celebrities such as writer Truman Capote and fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld who became friends. “When I first interviewed Lagerfeld, he invited me into his bedroom and started throwing shirts at me. I wore them to work for years.” His “Vogue” boss Anna Wintour also became a close confidant. “I was at her wedding and she gave me the bouquet. I learned a lot from Anna: Be fast, make decisions and stick to it.»

But he later fell out with both of them – and was frustrated, disappointed and hurt. Lagerfeld had “a tendency to banish people he loved from his life”. Wintour is not capable of “simple human kindness (…)”. Talley also looked back sadly at himself in his autobiography: “There has never been any love in my life.”

dpa