Who were the right hand of Anna Wintour and one of the most influential African-Americans in the sector, has died this Tuesday in a New York hospital.
As reported a few hours ago by the former editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, through his website, Air Mail, André Leon Talley has died this Tuesday in a hospital in White Plains (New York) after suffering a heart attack. With more than 50 years of career behind her, Talley wrote for several prestigious fashion publications, such as Women’s Wear Daily, W, or The New York Times, but it was his work in the American edition of Voguewhat made him famous to the general public. He was the magazine’s chief information officer, its creative director, and one of Anna Wintour’s confidants, becoming the first African-American to hold a prominent position in the fashion industry.
Born in 1948 in Washington DC, he grew up with his grandmother in North Carolina, studied French literature at Brown University, and in 1974 was discovered by Diana Vreeland, the famous editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, with whom he worked on the exhibitions of fashion of the Metropolitan Museum of New York. he later met Andy Warhol and began his career at the artist’s magazine, Interview. In 2020, already removed from the media spotlight, he published a memoir The Chiffon Trenches, in which he reviewed his years in the profession and narrated his efforts in breaking down racial barriers in fashion.
Although the figure of Leon Talley was associated with luxury and frivolity, the truth is that his career was full of lights and shadows. “I keep the good, but fashion can be a very cruel environment,” he commented a year ago in an interview in S Moda. African-American and from a lower-class family, the editor spent half his life striving to enter an environment, that of the fashion of the 70s and 80s, plagued by classist and racist gestures. He resigned from his post as Paris correspondent for Women’s wear daily magazine when he learned that in certain circles he was mocked as Queen Kong.
After a few years working at Ebony magazine, created for African-American audiences, and writing features at The New York Times, Talley came to the American edition of Vogue in 1983 as a news editor; in 1988, at the hands of its director Anna Wintour, he would become the creative director of the publication. It was then that his figure acquired world fame; his ironic character and his style, almost always dressed in colorful kaftans (later he would say that he used them to “hide his insecurity”) made him a fashion icon in the nineties and the first two thousand.
In 2008, he worked as a style adviser to Michelle Obama during his first months as a first lady. And in 2010 he began working as a jury on the reality show America’s Next Top Model and returned to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which was his first job, to act as master of ceremonies at its annual gala. Three years later, when he was at the top of the media, he left Vogue due to disagreements with Anna Wintour, whom he describes in his memoirs as someone cold and calculating who pushed him away for “being older and uncomfortable.
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
