The Chiffon Trenches: A Black Man’s Crusade Through Fashion

Photograph: Squire Fox/August

It is embarrassing, to say the least, to not have known the force that is André Leon Talley until my senior year at NYU. It was then, in a Media and Fashion course, where I was exposed to his documentary, The Gospel According to André. In the film, his booming voice detailed his roots in North Carolina, the women who raised and supported his career, and my favorite part, how religion and church influenced his attraction to fashion. To Talley, going to church was just the same as walking down a runway. It represented a world aside from the racism he experienced in the Jim Crow South. The church was not just a safe haven for his spirituality, which still followed his throughout his career in fashion, but it was where he first fell in love with clothing. Dressing one’s best each Sunday Morning resonated with me. It’s the ritualistic aspects of clothing and dressing up that allow us to create lasting memories. And it’s Talley’s memories that are most fascinating and to a degree, almost photographic. He can recall exactly who was wearing what, that one night at Studio 54. His knowledge of fashion alone is remarkable and exact. He attributes it; however, to “doing his homework”, something he encourages all young people entering fashion.

Talley’s new memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, highlights how a black man’s journey within luxury fashion is often unheard of. However, it’s not the regular “rags to riches” narrative. Talley discloses his most intimate life details, from his strained relationship with his mother to growing up with reoccurring molestation and grooming, The Chiffon Trenches allows the reader to not only learn the “gossip” of fashion couturiers and the upper echelons of famed publications, but also portrays a delicate side of Talley, his demons and a wonderful perspective on grief and fashion.

Talley makes it clear that he never imagined a life like this. He was set out to become a French teacher when he was pulled into the world of fashion through friends at RISD while pursuing his masters at Brown. Once he hit NYC, he interned at the MET and was mentored by the legendary Diana Vreeland who petitioned Andy Warhol to open arms to young Talley. It was there at Warhol’s Interview Magazine where he gained his stamina. From receptionist to editor to WWD to Vogue to everything else, Talley has conquered fashion, and not to mention doing so while black. He writes extensively of the racism that the industry bred and how often times his power was feared to the point where untrue rumors were created to ‘put him back in his place’.

I listened to the audiobook version of The Chiffon Trenches and I am so glad I chose to do so. Hearing André recount his fantastical life was so endearing. It sounds cliché, but it truly felt like he was speaking directly to me. The voices he put on were also fabulous, especially when he would yell “ANDY!!!” each time Warhol’s explicit actions and taste would shock him. I also couldn’t hold in my laughter when he mimicked Karl Lagerfeld’s deep and serious German accent. His tones and infliction added a sincerity to the memoir. His emotions seeped through when recounting the countless deaths within his inner circle and especially when he spoke of his grandmother’s passing and his traumatic childhood sexual abuse that not only led to a lifelong fear of intimacy but also to an unhealthy, secret habit of binge eating.

Bob Colacello : Andre Leon Talley, Warhol and Bianca Jagger at Bianca Jagger's birthday dinner, Mortimers, 1981

Yet, Talley’s memoir is more than anecdotes of the highs and lows of what the fashion industry is able to churn out. As readers, we explore how Talley processes and accepts the deaths that surround his life. From his grandmother, who Talley credits to being one of the most influential woman in his life, to his closest friends like Yves Saint Laurent and LouLou de la Falaise, as well as his guiding figures Diana Vreeland and Karl Lagerfeld. It feels strange to think of grief and fashion aside one another. Yet, the memoir is named rightly so. Not many can visualize how fashion can be barbaric, with ruthless leaders and corrupt politics like a war-zone, André needed trenches to take cover and survive. Fashion is, in a sense, fleeting and so are its members. Talley speaks of these passings with dignity and sorrow. He relays his favorite memories as well as harsh realities, like how Lagerfeld seemed to distance himself from Talley towards the end of his life after decades of a great friendship. He writes how Lagerfeld himself never wanted to speak of death and most certainly never attended funerals.

Photo by Robert Fairer

Even so, whether it be death or funerals, the industry professionals seem to share a discomfort with vulnerability when it comes to their personal lives. Talley recalls a poignant time during his tumultuous relationship with infamous Anna Wintour. After not speaking with Anna Wintour for quite some time, Talley was surprised to receive a call from Wintour that her mother had passed. The phone, as Talley relays, quickly cut out as there was a snowstorm in London. Anna was alone and André was in North Carolina. He soon flew to Miami and then to London as Wintour’s husband urged Talley to make the trip. He described Anna reading her mother’s eulogy, with tears welling up she ran out of the room. André followed her and there, he in his grand stature of 6’6, held Wintour as she wept. It is details like this that make Andre’s memoir so compelling. Through all fashion politics and strained relations, real life still occurs outside of fashion and it is a painful existence.

Wintour and Talley at the CFDA Fashion Awards dinner in New York, January 1988. Photograph: Fairchild Archive/Penske Media/Rex/Shutterstock

With Wintour in 2007. Photograph: Brad Barket/Getty Image

Many have clung to the bitter end of Talley and Wintour’s relation as she is universally known as a cold, emotionless figure. She urged Talley to seek help regarding his weight, some may say by fat-shaming him. She, as Talley writes, is a “Colonial Dame”, unaware of her white privilege. Yet, tabloids have seemed to ignore his full painting of her as a complex and vulnerable woman. She may be the Devil who wears Prada, but André equally reflects on their friendship and incredible work together. One thing that resonated me more than anything, was his hope that Anna finds a way to apologize before he dies. Talley shows us how quickly relationships within fashion can fade or be brutally severed for no real reason, and it is with Talley’s spirituality that has allowed him to not only pray and find comfort in life, but to understand that closure is necessary. As a runway show ends, as Studio 54 shuts down, as a designer’s reign at a couture house ends, fashion is about beginnings and endings. Accepting this cycle, especially with those who accompanied you, is what allows us to enjoy what has been done in fashion, and eventually what will be of the future. Perhaps fashion publications in the future will be open to diversifying its upper echelons. Maybe there will still be the stereotyped drama and cattiness that comes with a life of celebrity and entertainment. However, one thing that we can take away from Talley is although you can be there for others, fashion is inherently about acceleration and disposing of the past. It is cutthroat and no one can build your trenches for you but yourself. He remarks, “Fashion does not take care of its people. No one is going to take care of me, except I am going to take care of myself.”

Photo: Jonathan Becker/Contour by Getty Images