André Leon Talley: In & Out of VOGUE

HE WORKED ALONGSIDE FASHION’S LEGENDARY ANNA WINTOUR FOR DECADES. NOW HE REVEALS WHAT IT TOOK TO WIN – AND KEEP – HIS SEAT IN THE FRONT ROW

- Jason Sheeler

His grandmother worked as a maid in the men’s dormitories at nearby Duke University for 50 years, and Talley’s childhood was filled with the reliable rhythm of church events and his grandmother’s baking. “A pan of her biscuits for me alone,” he remembers fondly of weekends. But he has much darker memories too. Starting at age 9, he was sexually abused.

“It was not one man, it was many – teenagers and men throughout the neighbourhood,” he says. “It was painful. It was serial. And it took place in dark places, like the woodshed. I was afraid to tell anyone. At that time, we didn’t have hotlines for sexual abuse or suicide. It has lived with me until I wrote this book.” But he did find an escape. “I would walk across the railroad tracks to the Duke campus, and I would buy Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar,” he says. “I would devour them, hanging the pages on the wall – Naomi Sims, Pat Cleveland, the great African-American models. I made my own world.”

Talley left his abusers behind when he moved to North Carolina Central University, then landed a scholarship to Brown University, where he got a Master of Arts degree in French literature. Determined to create images like the ones on his bedroom walls, he moved to New York City, volunteered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and got himself hired as an assistant to Andy Warhol at Interview magazine. There, he interviewed designer Karl Lagerfeld, who became “a surrogate brother” and later helped him land a job at Women’s Wear Daily in New York City and later Paris.