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The fashion industry and the world lost another cultural monument: the larger-than-life, André Leon Talley. That name holds weight across the globe for a multitude of reasons, but no bigger reason than his love for making fashion inclusive of Black folks. More than anything, he proved that there’s beauty in Blackness and we are not a monolith by any means.
Born in Washington, D.C., Talley came into this world a fighter on October 16, 1948. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Durham, North Carolina. At that point, his grandmother, who he affectionately called Mama, raised him in the heart of the Jim Crow South. In his memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, he recalls what it felt like to be a little Black boy with big dreams in a state that enforced racial segregation. He wrote, “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. 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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His grandmother and the south heavily influenced him as they immersed him in the importance of Black culture. Style and glamour always enamored Tally in a way that motivated him to be something bigger than he ever imagined. His passion for fashion started in the church, but grew exponentially as he gained more knowledge. The soon-to-be journalist would spend hours in the Durham city library flipping through books and magazines, filling his brain with joyous ideas. “My world became the glossy pages of Vogue, where I could read about Truman Capote’s legendary ball, given at the Plaza, in honor of Katharine Graham,” he wrote. The visuals of Vogue made him think about beauty and fashion and soon had the realization that fashion was his world as it provided an escape.
Keeping with pushing boundaries, Talley fell in love with French after watching Julia Childs cook on television. After high school, he attended a historically Black college, North Carolina Central University (NCCU) in his hometown. He later studied French Literature at Brown University, where he received a scholarship. During that time, fashion became his devotion and, with his friends, they created fashion moments that ultimately taught him what freedom looked like. He was no longer in the Jim Crow South. “Brown gave me a freedom and liberation and propelled me into a world I love,” he said in the documentary, The Gospel According to Andre.
In 1974, he took the biggest risk of all and moved to New York. Also known as ALT, he started his career in fashion volunteering at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute helping Diana Vreeland, who quickly became his mentor. In the documentary, he shared, “She taught me the language of clothes, the language of style.” That probably speaks to one of his greatest quotes, “Fashion is fleeting. Style remains.”
