ANDRE LEON TALLEY TRIBUTE

Yhishara Cersie

Andre Leon Talley wore many hats during his 73 years of life. While most know him as the racially ground-breaking creative director for Vogue, he was also an author, stylist, role model, mentor, editor, radio host, fashion influencer, and icon. Later in life, he was a judge on America’s Next Top Model and served on the Board of Trustees for the Savannah College of Art and Design. He also featured in several documentaries, including a 2017 biography called The Gospel According to Andre. A clever title, as Talley was someone who greatly valued his faith and church life.

This value was not solely due to his personal spiritual journey. Church was the first place where he began to develop his sense of style. He would later say, “the clothes, the hats, the gloves, everything impeccable,” and his first fashion role model was his grandmother. Talley always stated that he owed her a great deal when it came to that because even though she “didn’t talk about style” to him, “she was style.” Other personal lessons came from growing up in poverty in North Carolina. Talley learned that “taste comes from within,” and lived his life by the following motto: “You can find beauty in your environment. You find beauty in your experience as a human being. You try to find beauty in everyone. You get through the day better if you can be positive about the word beauty and you can find beauty and you must not approach things negatively. You must always see in a stranger something beautiful or say something nice.”

Such attitude helped him a great deal in surviving as a Black person during the Jim Crow era. He made the decision early on that he was going to “escape this southern segregation,” but his method to do so was “through knowledge— knowledge and grace.” Those two things would have equal impact on his life when he attended university.

When he was younger, the knowledge of the fashion world began with his first Vogue magazine. He studied the pages, fascinated by the images of the clothes and people. However, instead of wanting to pursue a career in fashion, Talley originally chose to pursue education and wanted to be a French teacher. To that end, he pursued bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French Literature. But it was grace— as well as his innate charisma and affable nature —that opened doors in his social life for all that would come later as he met and befriended people with ties to the fashion industry.

He knew very well that his personality was not enough to keep him there if he should get a job in that field. And that’s where his studying of Vogue paid off. It was his incredible knowledge of fashion that got him noticed by the legendary Diana Vreeland when he was an intern. After Talley impressed her, she helped him find work at Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. From there, he would also work for Women’s Wear Daily, W, Ebony, and a few others. Then in 1988, he was hired to be the first African-American creative director for Vogue magazine under the editorship of Anna Wintour.

It goes without saying that he was nervous, but his response to that was the following: “I had all the confidence because my research— my power —my power comes from my knowledge not from my looks although my looks were armor.” For his first day at Vogue, his armor consisted of a grey Perry Ellis maxi

coat. And the rest, as they say, is fashion history.

One of the most amazing things about Talley was that once that landmark door opened for him, he in return held it open for other people of color to walk through. He often used his considerable influence with designers to get them to hire more Black models when showing their collections. He would help promote brands by introducing high profile clients to designers (such as Michelle Obama to Jason Wu). He styled Serena Williams and Michelle Obama; mentored the photographer Dario Calmese and Naomi Campbell, and featured models and designers of color in the magazines he worked for (particularly Japanese designers).

But regardless of how high his career took him, he never lost his footing. Talley was always firmly grounded in family, believing that “Family, no matter where you go, is everything”— even if, for him, that family was made up of close friends.