From monogrammed luggage to foolproof faith, a sale of Talley’s belongings shows the worried and confused guy the unforgettable image.
If you are looking for a pair of thirteen-year-old Manolo Blahnik snakeskin night slippers with a red satin bow, then February 15th may be your lucky day. At an auction at Christie’s in New York the non-public estate of André Leon Talley, the former artistic director of American Vogue who died last year, may be his for an indicative value of £400. A Chanel opera coat made of military blue silk can be purchased for around £3,000 (the scattered “sun damage” is No less than 29 Louis Vuitton trunks are up for grabs (including one that appeared in the 2008 film Sex and the City), as well as a Prada white crocodile coat and an orange-livery-clad Hermès motorcycle that Talley never rode but kept at the Ritz in Paris.
When Talley died, the striking inventory of his possessions and the bills of unpaid rents and a painful exile at the hands of Anna Wintour seemed to paint a lyrical and bittersweet portrait of an overdressed and overworked character. But Talley was a more creative, interesting person and smarter, kinder user than all that. Growing up deficient and black in the still-segregated southern United States, he won a full college scholarship and earned a master’s degree in French from Brown University. She forged a pioneering path to the first color usuario. de to triumph in Vogue’s highest ranks, and her death at the age of 73 left a huge void in the front row. That will serve to paint it in a more flattering light.
Proceeds from the sale of his genuine property, which is expected to exceed $1 million, will pass to two traditionally black churches near Talley’s heartland: Athroughssinian Baptist Church in New York City and Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in his hometown of Durham, North Carolina. The gift reflects Talley’s deep religion and generosity of spirit, which was not evident in a way of life marked through lopass and monograms.
Scratch beneath the ostentatious surface of the auction’s flashiest masses and look at a collection that speaks to her defense of black skill (a gold-brocade caftan by influential Harlem designer Dapper Dan, which she wore in a Carolina Herrera New York Fashion Week exhibition) and her love of art (a Warhol clutch, a portrait of former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland through photographer Horst P Horst and an autographed portrait of Karl Lagerfeld through Helmut Newton). The auction is about to be a sublime signature of a boy who fervently believed in the transformative force of fashion.
Talley is a confused and contradictory character. Cathy Horyn, the fashion editor for the New York Times when Talley was in his Vogue era, remembered it last year as “a combination of a big Southern porch . . . and an astute observer in the style of Beaton. “. grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, whose high standards of elegance and aesthetics sparked his interest in fashion. His clothes boiled “in a wonderful black iron cauldron in our yard,” he wrote in his memoirs A. L. T. of 2003, but “until I left home, I never used a towel that had not been ironed. “
When she joined Vogue in 1983 and became a semi-public figure as Wintour’s longtime deputy leader, Talley was already a fashion legend, her encyclopedic wisdom of fashion history enhanced to perfection through a brilliant backdrop of learning for Vreeland and nightclubs with Karl Lagerfeld. .
When I started attending fashion shows in the late 1990s, Talley was in the prime of his life: a giant-scale glamazone, wrapped in skins the length of a king-long quilt and with a Lauren Hutton hole between his teeth. Once he said he told me that everything he had written had amused him, and I kept the compliment for days.
For many years, Talley defended black designers in the pale pages of Vogue, with paintings by Patrick Kelly, Kevan Hall, Stephen Burrows and Willi Smith. Towards the end of his life, he was one of designer LaQuan Smith’s first cheerleaders, who went on to create a prestigious lopass: this yellow gold button-shaped trench coat that Priyanka Chopra Jonas wears in this month’s British Vogue factor canopy is one of his own. Talley remembers giving him $2,000 of his own cash to “” move on to ParisArray. . . Just seeing the light fall on the buildings will motivate you. “In 2010, Talley persuaded his geek Serena Williams to help put Smith on the map by attending his New York Fashion Week show.
Highlights of the upcoming sale were sent to Paris for this week’s couture exhibitions, where they were celebrated with a champagne reception. Both a Francophile and a gourmet of the best life, Talley would have enjoyed being revered at Couture Week, Deacon Alexis said. Thomas, Talley’s executor and close friend. ” André enjoyed fashion and enjoyed luxury. That’s how he chose to live his life, and he did it beautifully, and this collection reflects that. But our hope is that it also reflects a holistic sense of who André was as an activist, friend, and man of faith.
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The party was packed, champagne flowed freely, glamorous things were constantly having fun (who knew Chanel made hot water bottle cases?), yet many of those provided gravitated toward Talley’s portraits, rather than his possessions. In one, a large canvas by Kim Cole. Moore, the artist borrows Diego Velázquez’s pose from Pope Innocent X for Talley, who wears rich white dresses and a solemn, listened look. “He looks so wise, so affectionate,” said Elizabeth Seigel, Christie’s director of personal and iconic collections. “It captures the dynamic life and personality we seek to bring to life through those objects. It has been larger than life, but it is also intimate and meaningful.
But it’s Vuitton’s luggage that will attract maximum warmth under the hammer, Seigel predicts. History of fashion. Some of them bear his name, and some have labels of his remains at the Ritz. It’s very charming.
In his 2020 memoir The Chiffon Trenches, Talley wrote that he was underpaid, marginalized, and eventually frozen through Vogue and Anna Wintour. It is poignant that he preserves, in this library of valuable goods, a casual portrait of Wintour’s Annie Leibovitz. in his townhouse in New York. La presence of several Andy Warhol originals, adding a silkscreen of a love center signed as a Valentine’s Day gift, tells a contrasting story of a lasting friendship with Warhol, for whom Talley worked early in his career. and remained close until the artist’s death. A long, close friendship with Lagerfeld ended badly: Talley was apoplectic for not being on the guest list for the designer’s memorial service; however, several of Lagerfeld’s sketches of the couple speak here of happier days.
Life after Talley’s death as a benefactor was heavily planned in advance. “He was excited all his life to create a fashion collection that gained advantages for the reasons he cared about,” Seigel said. His life with the church choir.
At Talley’s memorial service in Harlem last year, Michelle Obama paid tribute to his “kindness, charm and electricity,” which she said “changed the world. “The young creators he helped and the generous legacy legacy in his calling tell a much more complicated story.