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Fashion icon Talley’s legacy — a powerful force for change

Chloe Street

WHEN André Leon Talley died on Tuesday, the fashion industry lost not just a powerful guiding force and one of its most outspoken voices on racism in the industry, but also a warm, witty and much-loved friend. Tributes have recalled an ebullient character who fostered young talent, promoted diversity and championed inclusiveness.

Born in 1948 and raised in North Carolina by his grandmother, Talley, who spoke fluent French and had a Masters from Brown University, began his fashion career with an internship at MoMA in 1974 under former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. Suitably impressed, she introduced him to Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, where he worked as a receptionist and began writing for the New York Times and W. He became Paris bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily, before joining US Vogue in the Eighties, working for editor Anna Wintour first as creative director — the first black man to do so — then as editor-atlarge until 2013.

Talley and Wintour spent 30 years side-by-side on front rows and at the parties of a social set that included Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Their friendship became strained in 2018 when Wintour appointed a YouTuber to cover the Met Gala in lieu of Talley, who claims in his 2020 memoir Chiffon Trenches to have been “very hurt” . Still, he always maintained the book was “a love letter to Anna.”

Talley’s most important legacy will be the work he did to promote black talent on the runways, the pages of Vogue and behind the scenes.

“To my 12-year-old self, raised in the segregated South, the idea of a Black man playing any kind of role in this world seemed an impossibility,” he wrote in his memoir. “To think of where I’ve come from, where we’ve come from, in my lifetime, and where we are today, is amazing. And, yet, of course, we still have so far to go.”

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2022-01-20T08:00:00.0000000Z

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