Twenty-five years ago one of the most beautiful men in the world died. That of its beauty is a more or less objective fact: in fact it was so beautiful that it lived on being beautiful until it stopped doing it (on living, it is understood). His name was Albert Delègue. And it is important to remember his name, just as it is important to remember the reason for his death, which was the AIDS pandemic.
So many centuries of art and literature to convince us that death reaches us all equally, and yet reality persists in denying it. That it reaches all of us we are not going to discuss at this point: it is the same thing that squeaks. Not all deaths are the same, nor are all pandemics. Take for example this one that still has us subjected: never a disease had promoted both the media exposure and COVID-19, and that we are all kept in our houses under seven keys (for the out there of Instagram there is still no restriction that is worth ). At the opposite extreme, there is another pest that remains perfectly operational without the same desire to air its individual impact emerging. But it is a high impact, if we consider that around the world there are some forty million people living with HIV. And as fortunately as its heyday is behind it, AIDS continues to kill some 770,000 people a year, according to data from UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Program on HIV / AIDS).
“As soon as I got to town, I showed up at the agency and knocked on the door. Well, it was Albert who opened it. He even helped me with the suitcase. He was not yet so well known, but as soon as you saw him you were amazed by how handsome he was, as well as being so polite ", someone from the fashion world who knew him tells us
Albert Delègue (1963-1995) was born in Rambouillet, about 42 kilometers from Paris, to a wealthy middle-class family: ceramicist mother, medical father, two older sisters. But his childhood and youth were spent in the Pyrenean village of Mérilheu, where he worked for several years as a ski instructor. Very sporty, he enjoyed going down the slopes of the La Mongie station just as much as sliding down the meanders of the Adour River.
His great opportunity was manifested in Paris in 1989. There he was caught by Olivier Bertrand, director of the prestigious modeling agency Success. They had been introduced by one of the agency's fellows, who happened to belong to Delègue's group of friends, and their stance did not go unnoticed by the seasoned booker . "I realized immediately that he would become a top model, " Bertrand told OK Podium magazine. "Two days after we signed him, he was already getting a very important contract."
A spot for Parfums Bourgeois placed him on the modeling map at the age of twenty-six. It could be said for this reason that Albert Delègue appeared at the race somewhat late, but for other reasons we would affirm that he did it at the right time. Because its emergence coincided with the beginnings of a hitherto unprecedented phenomenon that would hardly last a decade: the mannequin profession has never enjoyed as much disclosure and social prestige as in those golden years, nor would it do so again. Of course, and with a great difference, it was the women who in this matter took the lion's share. But there was also a small group of male supermodels that benefited from the boom : today only the most fanatical will be heard by the names of Michael Bergin, Cameron Alborzian, Marcus Schenkenberg or Greg Hansen; we remember Mark Vanderloo more clearly. Along with his friend Alain Gossouin, Delègue was part of an advance party of this fashion advent from the ranks of Success.
It was precisely in those ranks that he was met by a Spaniard who today is in charge of another important agency, and who prefers that his name not be mentioned. In the early nineties, when he was barely twenty years old, he too began a career as a model that took him from Madrid to Paris. And once there it was Delègue who opened the doors of Success for him. We literally want to say, “As soon as I got to town, I turned up at the agency and knocked on the door. Well, it was Albert who opened it. He even helped me with the suitcase. He was not yet so well known, but as soon as you saw him you were amazed by how handsome he was, as well as so polite. Not very high, yes.
"Madam, the men who do that are cowards," said a television collaborator sitting next to Albert Delègue, "and sometimes fags." The audience cheers him while the very short shot shows Delègue smiling with a certain unease
The height mattered little, since his strength was not the catwalks but the advertising. During the first half of the decade, Albert's face served as a claim for brands such as Calvin Klein, Valentino, Sonia Rykiel, Kenzo, Versace or the tan of that time Chevignon. But above all it was required as an image of Armani perfumes, a performance for which between 1991 and 1995 he accumulated five million francs (in exchange, about 760,000 euros). The sum, certainly very respectable, was far from the fees of a Christy Turlington (who had signed with Maybelline for a similar amount each year) or a Claudia Schiffer (who only earned about eleven million euros in 1995 alone).
But the contract made him appear little less than in any vaguely aspirational magazine that was printed in the world during that five-year period, separate posters and billboards. And, it is possible to think that due to the harmonic features that evoked a certain pan-European classicism, these advertising photos were immediately reappropriated to illustrate countless folders of schoolboys. In short, this was a world prior to the overabundance of digital imagery in which we now live.
Things were, in fact, very different in that world of yesterday that for a time is not so far from today. We will offer proof of this, since it incorporates our protagonist. In 1993, two years before his death, Delègue attended a program on the television channel TF1 called Coucou c'est nous! , sort of Gallic ancestor of El hormiguero where all kinds of things happen at a dizzying pace and without the guest being given a more relevant role than that of a simple alibi. One of those things that happens consists of a soothsayer mix of Carlos Jesús and druid Panorámix who advises listeners on their love affairs. To a woman who smells the worst because her last partner has not answered the phone in a long time, the seer confirms that they have just abandoned her. The presenter, named Christophe Dechevanne, then intervenes: "Madam, the men who do that are cowards." After a pause he feels confident and adds: "And sometimes fagots." The public cheers him. "So you don't miss a thing." More fuss from the public. A very brief shot shows Delègue smiling with all her professionalism as an international top model, and only from the perspective that today's world gives us would we notice that a certain discomfort filters through that smile. The moment can be seen from the minute 17:45 of this video.
Delègue died in Toulouse on April 14, 1995, and the family was quick to report the cause: a jet ski accident that happened the previous summer. It took up to five days for the L'Humanité newspaper to publish a brief information note that read: "The top model Albert Delègue has died of AIDS at the Purpan hospital in Toulouse, at the age of 32." The May issue of the gay magazine Idol repeated the information, specifying that the true cause of death had been encephalitis caused by HIV. EL PAÍS, in Spain, published the news on April 23: "Albert Delègue (32 years old), an advertising model known for his angular features, clear eyes and distant smile, died on Friday April 14 in Toulouse, France, victim of an encephalitis developed as a result of the AIDS virus. "
However, an intervention by Alain Gossuin in the television program Tout est possible that confirmed the press version was removed. Again, the family is pointed out as responsible for the censorship. "They wanted to silence the true motives for death," the colleague by profession and friend of Delègue would declare in 2010 to Playboy magazine. "But I thought my intervention would highlight a plague that had reached a worrying scope."
And Gossuin was not wrong. Neither regarding the magnitude of the tragedy, nor regarding the correctness of their intentions. If we have to thank those who have spoken publicly about the pandemic during these very long four decades that they have been accompanying us, it is their contribution to understanding that AIDS is a global problem, and that as such it affects us all. We actually understand it, and yet the stigma remains there, almost as present as the first day. The infected can talk about it: they already do it when they leave them, and they would do it even more if the stigma were not yet a reality, precisely.
But when Delègue died, not only did his family try to hide the causes: Karl Lagerfeld, a friend of hers, is said to have tried to buy all the copies of the Paris Match number where the obituary appeared in order to preserve his privacy. The story limps by the leg of plausibility, but if it were true there would be nothing to reproach the kaiser with. Among the motivations of everything that human beings think and do will always be present the social climate and the instinct to protect their loved ones.
But since 1995 we have learned many things, and one of them is that we have to keep talking about epidemics, about all epidemics, and we have to keep remembering the victims with their first and last names. Today, just remembering one of those victims, named Albert Delègue, Plato's phrase comes to mind that affirms (and forgive the warlike simile): "Only the dead have seen the end of the war."
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