FROM THE ARCHIVES: "Form and Content: On André Leon Talley’s THE CHIFFON TRENCHES" by Hawa Allan
Objectively material, a fabric that slips like silk between one’s fingertips, chiffon is also incredibly light and translucent, giving the appearance of being barely there or transparent like a phantom. This gauze-like cloth is an apt descriptor for the more than four-decade career in fashion journalism André Leon Talley chronicles in The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir. Fantasy-like, Talley’s glittering anecdotes—of designers and fine artists at work, of refined dinner parties among well-heeled aristocracy, of holding court at fashion show front rows and other VIP enclaves—recount actual occurrences. And yet, such experiences were made possible by one ephemeral sensibility: Talley’s exacting taste.
Talley knows what he likes. He is also certain of what he does not like. Through this discriminating quality, Talley managed to weave together a life of professional and personal gratification among a coterie of similarly fastidious friends and allies who all elevated their aesthetic preferences into an artform. Well-known as the aide-de-camp to veteran Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and the lone high-profile African American influencer at the near Bible-thick glossy, Talley has led a full life of his own beyond the shadow of the famously deadpan fashion maven, which he vividly recounts in his memoir. Despite the tabloidesque teasers preceding the book’s launch, which promised a behind-the-scenes tell-all of the rift between the pair, Talley instead portrays a begrudging yet military-style loyalty to Wintour, as well as bemused gratitude for his always adjacent and amorphous (albeit definitively lower) rank at the magazine. He writes: “I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision.”
While obviously hurt by his eventual discussion-less demotion from editor-at-large at Vogue—he is now memorialized on the masthead as ‘contributing editor’ and, thereby, permanently relegated behind the scenes—Talley hardly reads as bitter. Instead, he seems fairly tolerant of the cyclical trends of fashion, of which, like an eye of a storm, he for so long had been a central curatorial mainstay. Talley seems to understand that as quickly as you might be in, you can be out.
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Talley was born an only child and raised in Durham, North Carolina by his doting grandmother, who stepped in to assume the parental duties of her daughter, Talley’s mother, who is basically described as irascible and emotionally distant. Also alienated from his father, Talley’s sphere was limited to attending church with his grandmother (where “every Sunday was an unofficial fashion show”) and the local public library, where he would immerse himself in the tales of high-society parties like Truman Capote’s famous black-and-white ball in the pages of Vogue. His passion for fashion magazines led Talley to become a Francophile, and, in junior high and high school, to study French, which he subsequently majored in at college. He headed off to Brown University to obtain a master’s in the subject and fell in with the art crowd studying at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design. Though Talley had entered Brown with the intention of becoming a French teacher, he graduated with a letter of recommendation from the father of a RISD friend to intern at the Costume Institute at the Museum of Modern Art. And who else would have been then curating an exhibit at the New York City Institute but Diana Vreeland, former editor-in-chief of Vogue.
There is a saying that has been popularized by Instagram, acknowledging the preponderance of preening, humble-bragging, presentation of personality-as-brand, and marketing of one’s apparently active social life to avid fans, envious haters, and impassive followers. It goes something like: “Don’t compare your life to someone else’s highlight reel because you don’t see their behind-the-scenes.” From reading Talley’s memoir, not only did I end up wishing he’d had Instagram during the years he recounts, but I also got the feeling there wasn’t much difference between his behind-the-scenes and his highlight reel.
There were struggles, of course, as he details his inevitable bouts with racism (e.g., one of his editors accuses him of establishing close relationships with top designers by bedding them, and he is informed that one Parisian socialite had been referring to him behind his back as “Queen Kong”). He also discloses his childhood molestation by a neighbor as well as his binge eating, the latter he has relied on later in life as a coping mechanism to numb the pain of his abuse and the deaths of close friends and family. Though none of these difficult trials are highlight-reel material, they are, in their way, foundational to the many larger-than-life experiences captured in his memoir.
“I depended on sartorial boldness to camouflage my interior vortex of pain, insecurity, and doubt,” Talley writes. Cultivated from adversity, it was this fashion sensibility that had impressed Vreeland during his time at the Institute. Following Vreeland’s invitations to all the “right” parties and her ardent letter-writing campaign to prominent friends, Talley was drawn into an exterior vortex of a certain subset of late ‘70s and early ‘80s New York City, circulating among the likes of Liza Minnelli, Bianca Jagger, Diane von Furstenberg, and Andy Warhol, who soon hired him as an assistant at Interview magazine. Given that Interview’s headquarters was next door to The Factory, Warhol’s artist studio and beatnik haunt, Talley’s perch at the receptionist area was a thoroughfare for anyone who was anyone. And, indeed, “[w]ith Andy, anyone could be anyone and everyone was equal—a drag queen or an heiress.” As Talley recalls, if you were interesting, you were in, and once you were in, you were immediately pulled into a whirlwind of events, parties, dancefloors, debauchery, and anything else that was “happening.” In Talley’s descriptions—whether at Studio 54, movie premiers, or even on the sidewalk—New York City appears as a character in itself, vibrant and unpredictable, pulsing with an electrical force that animates Talley and all the uptown and downtown personas he was hanging with.
You name it, André Leon Talley was there. And not only was he there, he remembers what he was wearing. As “glorified receptionist” at Interview, Talley wore vintage topcoats he found for ten dollars at thrift stores and tweed trousers but “never jeans, as [he] never felt comfortable in a pair of jeans.” On his first assignment to interview designer Karl Lagerfeld, who would become a decades-long friend, he wore “khaki Bermuda shorts, a pin-striped shirt and aviator glasses from Halston, knee socks, and moccasin penny loafers.” After having been poached from Interview to work at Women’s Wear Daily, he wore “a lapeled smoking jacket and pant custom-made at Christian Dior on avenue Montaigne” for the evening portion of the Parisian wedding of Paloma Picasso, daughter of the eponymous artist. At his first meeting as creative director at Vogue—where he was recruited directly by Wintour, who had been re-installed after a couple of strategic lateral moves at other periodicals—Talley wore his “favorite custom-made double-breasted navy blue suit, with a pink shirt.”
Talley’s term as creative director was not his first rodeo at Vogue, nor with Wintour, whom he’d first met and worked with during an earlier stint at the magazine, when she was creative director under then editor-in-chief Grace Mirabella. After Mirabella was unceremoniously “tossed out,” (having first heard of her own firing on television news), Talley was invited back into the glossy fold to fill Wintour’s former shoes and help divine a new vision for the paragon of fashion monthlies.
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In Taste, Giorgio Agamben considers how his forbearers in the field of Western philosophy attempted to define this ambiguous sense. The Italian philosopher is not referring to perceiving flavors through the receptors embedded in one’s tongue, nose, and throat. He’s referring to another kind of “taste”—the “idea of another form of cognition, as distinct from sensation as science and located between pleasure and knowledge.” He explores that value judgement someone places on the pleasure they derive from whatever they are perceiving, be it a painting, a song, or someone’s face.
The faculty of taste, as Agamben discusses, is both specific and ambiguous—the connoisseur knows exactly what pleases her, yet she does not know exactly why. This conundrum makes up the “enigmatic relation between knowledge and pleasure” encapsulated by one’s taste—a kind of “knowledge which is not known,” which comprises “the knowledge of pleasure, and the pleasure of knowledge.”
This quasi-ineffable quality of taste mirrors the ultimate inscrutability of the object a tastemaker might determine is beautiful. The object of “beauty” is judged so by “knowledge that one cannot explain.” The beautiful object pleases the beholder, who derives pleasure from both the object and the knowledge of the pleasure it has inspired. In all of this, the object of beauty—to the one who is certain in having judged it as beautiful for unknown reasons—signifies something larger than itself, something beyond its particular amalgamation of lines, shapes, symmetry, tonalities, and resonances. What that is, who knows? All one knows is that the object possesses a certain je ne sais quoi.
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“I was a fixture, a force, and a fierce advocate of fashion and style,” Talley writes in the memoir’s introduction. He also acknowledges how, for most of his career, he was the only person of color in “the upper echelons of fashion journalism.” Nonetheless, though certainly a tastemaker, it would be a stretch to call Talley a decision-maker, at least when it came to Vogue. Under Wintour’s reign, relatively higher-ups like Talley, as well as fashion director Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele and fashion director Grace Coddington, would be given autonomy to execute their respective assignments, including the coveted “narrative” photo shoots arranged to craft a fairy tale through a series of glamour shots of models and actresses in designer attire. However, when it came to how, or whether, the product of these assignments would appear in the magazine, Wintour had the final word.
Well, “word” is not the right terminology to describe how Wintour carried out her executive power, as she typically made wordless decisions, bewildering her deputies as to the rationale behind her judgements. All they knew for certain was that her taste would always overrule theirs. As Talley describes, he graciously abided by Wintour’s arguably arbitrary rule, conceding to her authority without challenge. In reading The Chiffon Trenches, one might be led to believe that Talley’s strict adherence to rank could have arisen from his avowed Southern sensibilities, by way of which he demonstrates devout politesse. Not only does Talley have an uncanny ability to recount his wardrobe on special occasions but also the thank you notes thereafter sent and received.
His friendship with Karl Lagerfeld, for example, seemed to require vigilance in all such areas. “Karl was the kind of person you didn’t take for granted,” Talley writes. “You had to be on your toes when you went to see him, and dressed to the nines whenever he saw you, and you could not let him see you wearing the same thing twice, even on the same day.” Lagerfeld was known to be a very generous albeit fickle friend, bombarding his acquaintances with gifts and bankrolling their existences one day, then freezing them out with silence the next. Despite that, Talley shares warm recollections of his late friend that contrast the evident stress and psychological terror Lagerfeld seemed to inflict on those close to him.
Given the social milieu Talley faithfully describes, it is no coincidence that he repeatedly refers to his clothing as armor. Talley’s allegiance to rank and manners is, yes, military-like, but also seems to relate to race. Although it is clear that Talley was there, it is also readily apparent that he considered himself a perpetual guest, even in the profession within which he was elevated to the near top. “Anna Wintour made me the highest-ranking black man in the history of fashion journalism,” Talley writes. While he acknowledges the glass ceiling Wintour represented to his further ascension, it’s striking to read how Talley rarely imagined a vision for himself outside the strictures in which he was “made.” He often refers to how Anna “let” him do this or that, and highlights his value in terms of his proximity to power brokers like her and Lagerfeld.
Talley is self-aware about this predicament. “We’ve been educated to appreciate and evolve our paradigms through the telescopic world of white,” he writes. And as a 6’6” African-American man, Talley navigated this white world “with extreme caution” and impeccable manners. (Talley is also gay, but as he notes, in fashion “[a]ll the principals were gay, something that was understood and never discussed.”) He took for granted the apparent limitations of his milieu and merely strove to secure a place within it. “I didn’t have time back then to contemplate my plight as a black man making it in the world,” Talley writes. “I was too busy trying to make it work.” Even with respect to issues of diversity and representation within the magazine’s pages or his friends’ runways, Talley made sure never to demand, only, as he put it, to finesse. In that light, Talley was an influencer before his time, only the attention he sought was that of other higher-ups in the fashion realm rather than his own audiences, whom he didn’t seem to imagine. Being in a position to influence Wintour and others was as close to the top as he could realistically fathom.
There are flashes of Talley’s unfettered talent in the memoir. Chief among them is his “discovery” (at least by American tastemakers) of the designer John Galliano. After getting a tip about Galliano from a staff member at French Vogue, Talley was awed and raved that “the way Galliano cut clothes was magical.” When describing him to Wintour, he called Galliano the “Baudelaire of couture!” Later, when Talley brought Wintour to witness Galliano at work, he spied a mannequin clad in a grand ball gown. The bottom of the dress had tubing sewn into the hem that created the effect of a big hoop skirt reminiscent of the nineteenth century. “Looking at that dress, I knew Galliano was creating one of the greatest collections in Paris,” Talley recalls. “It wasn’t even finished yet but I could just tell.” Having subsequently learned of Galliano’s financial troubles, Talley launched into action, luring patrons to fund his next collection, helping to scout the locale, and, of course, inviting everyone who was anyone to that season’s fashion show, thereby catapulting Galliano into a household name and head designer at Christian Dior. Talley managed all of this with the blessing of Wintour, who was later credited with having “discovered” Galliano herself. This would be yet another event that would lend further clout to her forbidding symbolism.
Wintour’s silent judgement, her taste, at once inscrutable and unpredictable in its negative appraisal, thereby keeping those whose work she oversaw on their toes, bears some similarity to the white gaze. The “haute froideur” Talley describes—the unreadable face framed by dark sunglasses and that iconic bob—projects an image of authority which the subjects of her dominance attempt to internalize in order to make the cut. Wintour’s simulation of power through mere appearance recalls a scene in Jean Genet’s The Balcony, in which a queen deploys the gravity of her image in a desperate bid to restore order in the midst of a revolution. “In order to confuse even reason, Her Majesty removes herself from one secret chamber to another, from the servant’s hall to the Throne Room, from the latrines to the chicken coop, the chapel, the guardroom . . .” writes Genet. “She makes herself unfindable and thus attains a threatened invisibility. So much for inside the Palace. Outside—and from there you cannot be aware of it—the insurrection has attained such proportions that the very nation is in peril.” This passage aptly echoes the current demands within all facets of media for “diversity and inclusion,” which, even if cosmetic, make a publication like Vogue a prime target for upheaval. It’s too bad Talley is no longer around to dutifully advise Her Majesty.
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Talley provides another glimpse of his autonomy at work, this time as style editor for Vanity Fair, where he worked while on sabbatical of sorts from Vogue. (“I just walked into [Anna’s] office in New York one day, and when I walked out I slammed the door and left,” Talley writes of his decampment. “I don’t remember the specifics of what I said to her or what it was that pushed me to this point. I just remember that I was fed up.”) For Vanity Fair, Talley arranged a photo shoot featuring dressing gowns with big hoop skirts that had been reimagined by Galliano, inspired by Gone with the Wind. He cast Naomi Campbell as Scarlett O’Hara, subverting the white slaveholding damsel in distress by featuring a Black supermodel, and portraying recognizable white fashion heavyweights like Manolo Blahnik, “the Bernini of shoes,” and Galliano himself as her servants. “It was a breath of fresh air,” Talley writes of his time at Vanity Fair, “doing a photo shoot and then actually seeing it run in the magazine!”
Talley’s friendship with Campbell also reads like a breath of fresh air. He does share moments of icy rebuke from the infamously temperamental model, as when, sweltering on an airport tarmac, he dared suggest that he and his assistant board Campbell’s private jet before she was done smoking her cigarette. However, Talley also portrays her as a loyal and caring confidante whose friendship endured the industry’s capriciousness. Perhaps the two of them could relate. “Early on Naomi realized that as a woman of color, she had to work harder than her fellow supermodels to maintain her position in the apex of high fashion. She has this something, this je ne sais quoi, that allows her to maintain numerous and countless lives restored and renewed.”
Successfully navigating and, indeed, skimming the heights of an industry for which mere appearance is king seems to require the cultivation of some ineffable quality that may be signaled and sensed but nonetheless remains out of reach.
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“Hey, Naomi!” were the words that had formed my first catcall. And my second, and my third, etc. . . . With these words, I had been thusly transformed from an awkward, lanky teenager into an object of beauty, and I wasn’t happy about it. My displeasure wasn’t for the usual feminist reasons—objecting to objectification by male strangers who exacted their entitlement to accost random women and girls in public. For the most part, I resented the fact that this “appreciation” of my appearance was being mediated through a public figure. The shapeshifting of adolescence notwithstanding, I didn’t see myself any differently when first catcalled than I had at any time prior. All that I could sense had changed was that the image of the lone African-American supermodel had been sufficiently suffused into the collective consciousness, then projected onto me. If Naomi Campbell had been branded “beautiful,” then I—similarly tall and dark-skinned—must have been beautiful by association.
Up until this point, reared in a predominantly white and racist Long Island suburb, I had been accustomed to my fellow residents mediating my appearance primarily through my race, and accordingly had been primed to associate my acknowledged visibility with some kind of attack. I had been long aware that what many people “see” when they see me has very little to do with me, that I am, for them, a mere mirror of their own biases. So it followed that I would never assume personal responsibility for whatever quality my beholder readily attached to my appearance—regardless of whether this quality was considered positive or negative.
And despite noble calls for diverse media representation, I have also never accepted the fact that I could be seen through someone else, even if that person is Naomi Campbell. I have always been skeptical of “beauty,” and of anyone who attempted to charm me by identifying me as beautiful. If—as Agamben summarizes philosophical reflections in Taste—the beautiful object is always, to the one whose taste it suits, an “excess signifier,” signifying to the observer some element that is not really there, then there is always that possibility that what is beheld is not that transcendent and indescribable glimmer of the sublime, but rather the reflexive reaction to some kind of societal conditioning.
Though “beautiful” is a compliment that I have never been able to accept, my fashion sense is another story. Unlike Talley, I have never seen clothing as armor; I have always seen clothing as a mode of expression, and in that sense, as its own artform. I have always believed that garments give us the power to display ourselves as we choose, rather than to merely appear in sync with the conventions of society that has already categorized us. Fashion, for me, has been a tactic to assert my “self,” to butt against the strictures in which I have been pre-fit, to thwart the expectations of the gaze—and, perhaps, wear my soul on my sleeve.
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The Chiffon Trenches is not only a memoir of one man but also a record of a time long past, when magazines had seemingly endless budgets to subsidize whim and largesse. Staff writers have been replaced with freelancers and expensed black town cars supplanted by public transportation. Talley’s last visible role as Vogue representative was as red carpet presenter for the Met Gala, a fundraising benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute now organized by Wintour. Then, one year, without warning or notice, he was replaced by a young YouTube influencer with who-knows-how-many followers.
Talley lamented not only this wordless dismissal but also the evident lack of his replacement’s fashion knowledge. “Surely she didn’t know what a martingale back is to a Balenciaga one-seamed coat,” he writes. What does taste matter anyway, when it has been eclipsed and calculated by the number of “likes”? If it is true that taste is an amorphous faculty and, therefore, Talley might not know why he liked something, it is nonetheless also true that he has encyclopedic knowledge of fashion history. “Like an extinct dodo bird,” Talley writes, “my brain, rich and replete with knowledge, has been relegated to the history books.”
Alas, attention has long eclipsed taste and even knowledge as viable currency in a world dominated by social capital.
Why else, in America, would the ubiquitous and endless Kardashians be famous for absolutely nothing, and a reality television star become president? Yes, as Talley has described, fashion has jumped the shark, along with history, politics, and even the semblance of substance. Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame has come full circle, now doled out to anyone or no one, all for whom New York City is nothing more than a backdrop to a selfie. Perhaps now that the pendulum has swung so far into the direction of mere appearance, of empty form, there is a faint hope that it will someday swiftly rebound into the direction of that which is unknown, yet sensed, towards that divine content which we all seek but can’t seem to ever put our finger on. And, if it does, we’ll hopefully recognize it when we see it.
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly, and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Insurrection, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
