Looming Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley dies, aged 73

Former Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley has finally abandoned “the chiffon trenches” of the fashion world, a term he used for the title of his recent memoir, dying after suffering a heart attack at the age of 73.

From 1983 until his shock exit in 2018, Talley moved in the ozone of the fashion world, delivering gossipy and witty articles forVogue that skimmed the surface of his profound knowledge of design. Just as impressive was his close relationship withVogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, which unravelled, leaving Talley hurt and perplexed.

“I had suddenly become too old, too overweight, and too uncool, I imagined, for Anna Wintour, Talley wrote in The Chiffon Trenches, released in 2020. ” For Talley, Wintour’s crime of fashion and taste was leaving the task of firing him to a mid-level Vogue employee. “Anna should have had the decency and kindness to call me or send me an e-mail.”

Despite high-profile roles at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, The New York Times and Women’s Wear Daily, where Talley as bureau chief of the Paris office formed an enduring friendship with Karl Lagerfeld, Vogue was Talley’s destiny. Raised in Durham, North Carolina by his grandmother, a maid at Duke University, the magazine offered an entrée to a world that his 198cm frame would eventually dominate.

“Vogue was my hobby, and no one in my family ever had a copy of the magazine in the house until I did,” Talley told designer Miuccia Prada in Interview magazine, in 2003. “The big experience was on Sundays after church. I’d wash the dishes, walk to the white part of town … to the newsstand that was open on Sundays. That was my big joy.”

After completing a Masters in French Literature at Brown University, Talley’s fashion education began when he worked as an unpaid intern for former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (now housed in the Anna Wintour Costume Centre).

“I became of Mrs Vreeland’s favourite volunteers in what was really like a fine fashion finishing school. Through Diana Vreeland I learned to speak the language of style, fantasy, and literature,” Talley wrote in The Chiffon Trenches.

While Talley’s voice boomed with refinement and knowledge, he was still subjected to racism in the fashion front row and at the high society parties he frequented with Lagerfeld and later Wintour.