André Leon Talley

André Leon Talley was born in Washington on the sixteenth of October 1948 and raised in Durham, North Carolina, by his grandmother Bennie Frances Davis, who cleaned dormitories at Duke by day and raised a prince by evening. North Carolina Central gave him his degree in French; Brown University gave him a master's, with a thesis on Black women in Baudelaire; and Diana Vreeland, taking him as her unpaid apprentice at the Met's Costume Institute in 1974, gave him the door.

Through Andy Warhol's Factory and Interview, then Women's Wear Daily and W — rising by the late seventies to Paris bureau chief — he became the eye American fashion could not do without. Vogue named him fashion news director in 1983, and in 1988 its creative director: the first African American man to hold the role, which he kept until 1995. He returned in 1998 as editor-at-large, the great caped presence of the front rows until 2013, championing Black designers and models in rooms that had never made space for them.

He wrote his life twice — A.L.T. (2003) and The Chiffon Trenches (2020), a bestseller that spoke candidly of his later estrangement from the house he had served — and the cinema wrote it once more in Kate Novack's The Gospel According to André (2017). The Savannah College of Art and Design kept him as trustee, doctor, and namesake of a gallery.

He died at a hospital in White Plains, New York, on the eighteenth of January 2022, at seventy-three, of complications of a heart attack. Honored be André Leon Talley, who walked into every room as if his grandmother were watching, because she was.