André Leon Talley


André Leon Talley is an American fashion journalist, who is the former American editor-at-large of Vogue magazine. Talley has also served as international editor of the Russian fashion magazine Numéro.

Early life and education

Talley was born on October 16, 1948, in Washington, D.C., as the son of Alma Ruth Davis and William C. Talley, a taxi driver. His parents left him with his grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, who was a cleaning lady at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. Davis raised him and Talley claims he was given an "understanding of luxury." His grandfather was a sharecropper.
Talley grew up in the Jim Crow era South, where the segregation was clear. He recalls: "for a long time my grandmother would not allow white people to come into our house. That was her rule. The only white man who ever came into the house was the coroner." His love for fashion was cultivated at an early age by his grandmother and his discovery of Vogue magazine, which he first found in the local library at the age of nine or 10.
Talley was educated at Hillside High School, graduating in 1966, and North Carolina Central University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French Literature in 1970. He later won a scholarship to Brown University, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in French Literature in 1972. At Brown, he wrote a thesis on Charles Baudelaire and initially planned to teach French.

Career

Beginning in 1974, Talley worked at Andy Warhol's Factory in New York City and at Warhol’s Interview magazine for $50 a week. That same year Talley volunteered for Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He went on to work at Women’s Wear Daily and W, from 1975 through 1980. He also worked for The New York Times and other publications before finally landing at Vogue, where he worked as the Fashion News Director from 1983 to 1987 and then as Creative Director from 1988 to 1995. He pushed top designers to have more African-American models in their shows. He left Vogue and moved to Paris in 1995 to work for W, and served as contributing editor at Vogue. In 1998, he returned to Vogue as the editor-at-large until his departure in 2013 to pursue another editorial venture.
From 2013 to 2014, he served as international editor of Numéro Russia, joining the team shortly after the magazine launched in March 2013 but resigned after 12 issues. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Savannah College of Art and Design since 1995.
In April 2017, Talley began hosting his own radio show principally concerned with fashion and pop culture on Radio Andy, a Sirius XM satellite station.
Talley is the subject of a documentary film, The Gospel According to André, directed by Kate Novack, which was screened in September 2016 at the Toronto Film Festival and was released in the US in May 25, 2018. Reviewing the film, Variety magazine said: "The documentary is a deeply loving, frequently beautiful testament to the former Vogue editor, who rose from humble beginnings in North Carolina to become arguably the high fashion world’s first major African-American tastemaker, as well as the type of multi-lingual, Russian-lit-citing public intellectual who is perfectly at ease gossiping on TV with Wendy Williams."

Personal life

In the mid-2000s, Anna Wintour initiated an intervention to get Talley to lose weight. As seen on The Oprah Winfrey Show, he eventually lost a great deal of weight, and was eating more healthfully.
In 2007, he was ranked 45th in Out magazine's "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America". In 2008, Talley advised the future First Family on fashion, and introduced Michelle Obama to the Taiwanese Canadian designer Jason Wu, from whom she bought several dresses, including her inaugural gown. Talley's most famous pairings of late have been with designers Tracy Reese, Rachel Roy, and singer/actress Jennifer Hudson. He is known as a very close friend of pop diva Mariah Carey, fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, and tennis star Venus Williams. From March 2010 to December 2011, Talley served on the judging panel for America's Next Top Model.
In October 2011, the André Leon Talley Gallery opened in the SCAD Museum of Art.

Filmography

Awards and memberships

Talley has been recognized for his significant work in fashion journalism.
Talley wrote an autobiography entitled A.L.T.: A Memoir, published by Villard in 2003. According to Publishers Weekly, the message delivered by the book is that "Style transcends race, class, and time."
He also authored A.L.T. 365+, an art monograph designed by art director Sam Shahid, published in 2005. 365 features photos and captions from one year of Talley's life.
Talley co-wrote with Richard Bernstein the book MegaStar, with an introduction by Paloma Picasso, which includes portraits of famous stars.
Talley's latest book is The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir, released on May 19, 2020. In the book, he discusses getting his start in New York City in the 1970s, his tumultuous relationship with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and his experiences with racism in the fashion world.