By Dennis Romero
Pioneering fashion journalist André Leon Talley died Tuesday in New York at the age of 73.
His death was confirmed on his Instagram account.
The cause of death has not been provided.
For decades, the former creative director and managing editor of Vogue shaped fashion and trends, but he was never afraid to break the rules.
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Talley was born in Washington DC and raised in Durham, North Carolina by his grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, who he says had a flair for fashion and influenced his attraction to the industry.
As a child he ventured to the Durham library and discovered Vogue, beginning his relationship with the publication as a devoted reader.
Talley attended North Carolina Central University before earning a master's degree in French studies at Brown University in the early 1970s, the years when bell-bottoms were in style.
Working as an assistant to Andy Warhol, a plastic artist and a leading figure in the
pop-art art
movement , placed Talley in a position of power in the world of art and culture.
In that decade he became the Paris bureau chief of Women's Wear Daily and began contributing fashion coverage to The New York Times.
In 1983, he went to work for Vogue magazine as director of fashion news and later as chief creative officer.
He left Vogue in the 1990s, returned as editor-at-large, and left for good in 2013 to run Numéro Russia, a style publication, but quit after a year.
When former President Barack Obama entered the White House, Talley was hired to advise his family on fashion.
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In subsequent years, she served as a judge on the reality television hit
America's Next Top Model.
Talley's gaze was intense and intimidating, and her six-foot height was a foretaste of the wit and intellect behind her criticism of fashion.
His idea of shocking fashion included breaking the rules, but only if you know them.
In 2017, Talley addressed the trend for men in rompers—the short version of the jumpsuit—explaining his particular vision to St. Louis Magazine: “The romper trend is not universal.
I don't see Kanye West dating a wimp, or Drake, or Justin Bieber.
Certainly not Leonardo DiCaprio.
James Corden could wear a romper."
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Talley's influence reached beyond the catwalk and the magazine pages: she appeared in the 2008 film
Sex in the City
, in the Vogue documentary
The September Issue
, and in
Valentino: The Last Emperor
, a documentary. about the designer.
He was also the subject of the 2018 documentary
The Gospel According to André.
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"Over the last five decades as an international icon he was a close confidant of Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Paloma Picasso and had a penchant for discovering, nurturing and celebrating young designers," read the social media post reporting his death.
His 11-bedroom colonial home in White Plains, New York, the subject of a legal dispute this year over who has ownership and residency rights, seemed to suggest Talley's comfortable-yet-grand sense of style.
It included the sofa in author Truman Capote's apartment in United Nations Plaza.
His desire and imagination were awakened when he was still a teenager and he read Vogue's coverage of the Black and White Ball, an evening that the writer Truman Capote organized at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1996. A refined world in which "they never spent bad things,” according to The New York Times in its review of her 2020 memoir,
The Chiffon Trenches
.
Talley's memoir was notable for revealing her tumultuous relationship with another Vogue fashion deity, Anna Wintour.
But it also brought a new understanding of his own childhood and his attraction to the fashion runway, and how race in America was a key to his gaze.
His voice was more than seductive.
He used it to encourage inclusion in an industry that has its racial archetypes.
He was a constant voice of encouragement for the underachievement of black culture, especially in the realm of style.
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Rihanna, Janelle Monae, Kerry Washington, Lupita Nyong'o.
When they walked the Met Gala, what he called the Super Bowl of fashion, he hailed them like a proud father.
"How pretty is your dress," he told Washington.
Her sense of propriety and pomp in fashion dates back to her days of going to church with her grandmother.
He often made the distinction that it was not just the church, but the black church.
“In the black South, the church culture was almost like high school,” Talley told Garden & Gun in 2018.
He told the magazine that one of his proudest moments was when Edward Enninful became the first black man to run British Vogue magazine, telling Talley, "You paved the way."