Photograph by Arthur Elgort

THE CHIFFON TRENCHES

A MEMOIR

André Leon Talley

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

First published in the United States by Random House in 2020

Copyright © Cornell Street, Inc 2020

Cover photograph by Colin Douglas Gray

André Leon Talley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008342340

Ebook Edition © March 2020 ISBN: 9780008342357

Version: 2020-03-26

Dedication

For Reverend Doctor Calvin O. Butts III, minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York City

In loving memory of Lee Bouvier Radziwill

Epigraph

How I got over, how I got over

My soul looks back and wonders how I got over

—CLARA WARD

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Best-Dressed List

Picture Section

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By André Leon Talley

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

For more than four decades, I went through a series of voyages with Vogue magazine and its editor in chief, Anna Wintour, the most powerful person in fashion. I was a fixture, a force, and a fierce advocate of fashion and style.

When I was an adolescent, Vogue was my inspiration. When other kids were tacking up baseball cards to their bedroom walls, mine were filled with the pages of the world’s most influential fashion magazine. To my twelve-year-old self, raised in the segregated South, the idea of a black man playing any kind of role in this world seemed an impossibility. To think of where I’ve come from, where we’ve come from, in my lifetime, and where we are today, is amazing.

And yet, of course, we still have so far to go.

As I write this, I have just seen Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s September 2018 Vogue cover. It is, in some ways, another in a long line of fantastic images that made it through the meticulous process of becoming the cover of Vogue.

And then, in other ways, it stands alone.

This picture, and what it represents, is hugely important and significant. When you look at this cover and you know that Anna Wintour, whose exquisite taste has defined Vogue for decades, gave Beyoncé creative control of her cover and cover story, then you start to understand its importance. And it was the September issue, the biggest issue in the yearly lineup! Beyoncé is an incredible tsunami of talent and power. She cannot be defined through the cultural standards that define Vogue; Beyoncé defines herself.

When I first saw this cover, I knew it was history in the making. Chosen at Beyoncé’s suggestion, photographer Tyler Mitchell, at only twenty-three years old, became the first black man to shoot a cover image in the 125-year history of one of the most prestigious magazines to ever exist.

Beyoncé stands out on a lawn somewhere outdoors, no big expensive studio. There’s a flowing white sheet on a line, like laundry, as a backdrop.

Besides the rococo fresh flower arrangement on her head, Beyoncé’s dressed simply, in a long Gucci dress. Her makeup, natural. Her skin moisturized and her knees exposed, and firmly together. No apologies or nuance or overt sexuality.

That image conjures for me laundry drying in the fresh open air. Mitchell’s photograph suggests the laundress, that bygone station, delivering white linens to the white master’s big white house. Crisp, immaculate whiteness. Cicely Tyson in the film Sounder, making money to feed her sharecropping family; my great-grandmother and grandmother, doing the weekly laundry, backs bent and weary in fatigue, just another duty in line with their responsibility for the “cleanliness is next to godliness” creed that is part of humble living.

In all its elegance, the sheet symbolizes so many black women, in their own confident beauty, who did laundry to survive, to provide for their families, to put food on the table. I find it subtly very black. Basic and black. Black with style.

As Mitchell so aptly pointed out in a Vogue interview about the shoot: “For so long, black people have been considered things.”

I see the influence of Kara Walker, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, along with the unnamed armies of black mothers and maids working for whites to keep food on their own tables. That’s amazing to me. The scene is fresh, unprecedented, and without parallel in the history of Vogue fashion covers.

Knowledge is power.

Fittingly, in the corresponding pages of Vogue, Beyoncé writes of exploring her roots and learning she’s the descendant of slaves. That is evolution. That is revolution. She describes how she fought to get her body back after her first child, and how with the twins she embraced her FUPA, her little baby stomach, and how her arms are bigger and she’s embraced that, too. As a black woman, she is going to inspire people.

The only other time Beyoncé was on the cover of Vogue, there was no story inside. She wanted to interview herself, and that was not allowed. And now this time, in 2018, she had full control of her story, suggesting the first black American photographer for the cover and writing her own narrative inside the issue. Beyoncé can do that because she’s the most popular woman in the world. And she chooses to do that because … why? I suspect because she knows what all black people know: It’s difficult to be a black woman or black man in this country.

We struggle to endure and overcome the centuries of ingrained white supremacy, the institutions of injustice and inequality, in every aspect of life in this, the great America.

I proudly wrote an op-ed for the Sunday edition of The Washington Post about the cultural significance of Beyoncé’s cover. Upon its publication, I sent a link to Susan Plagemann, the publisher of Vogue. She was thrilled with the piece and sent it off to every major editor in the Condé Nast lineup, including Anna Wintour.

Not one of those editors wrote me about the piece. Not one quick e-mail from Anna Wintour.

Editors I’ve worked with for decades didn’t understand the immense importance of this occasion simply because they are not capable of understanding. None of my contemporaries have seen the world through black eyes.

For so long I was the only person of color in the upper echelons of fashion journalism, but I was too busy pushing forward, making it to the next day, to really think about the responsibility that came with this role. Memories linger in the mind. Now I realize it is my duty to tell the story of how a black man survived and thrived in the chiffon trenches.

Although great strides have been made, I’m still very aware of my being black in this country. I’m aware that a black man still has to work one thousand times harder to live the American dream. I’m aware that every day when a black man wakes up in this country, no matter how successful or unsuccessful he is, his race will determine what he does and how far he goes in his life. No matter what you do, who you are, what career you choose, as a black man, you realize every day that our country was founded on the misguided rules and conceits of racism and slavery. A black man goes through life realizing, There but for the grace of God go I.

Racism moves under the epidermis as a constant, constant reality. It’s part of the fabric of our existence.

“We are a blues culture,” according to Cornel West. We invent the blues every day when we wake up. Good morning, heartache, I rise, yes I rise, thank God. Hope lives. You must wake up and create your own miracles every day. I went through my life on the strength of hope, and the memory of my ancestors, and the people who showed me unconditional love. There’s no sunny day, yet there is sunshine in my life. You have to hope. It’s a dangerous and perilous tightrope walk, and yet you must rise to meet the day.

We rejoice in Beyoncé and her blackness, in Tyler Mitchell and his blackness, and in all the generations behind them. I feel unspeakable joy for their landmark in history and for the future of fashion.

The power in knowledge cannot be understated. Whenever people ask me for advice, I tell them two things: Never give up on your dreams, and do your homework. “Homework” can mean a lot of things, but do your homework in life. Style will get you up the steps into the revolving door; substance and knowledge will allow you access to create new horizons. My great depth of knowledge is the number one skill I possess and has carried me throughout my career to this day. Rivers deep, mountains high. All the people who mattered in my life have approached me because of my knowledge. Throughout my career, designers liked spending time with me because I studied, and I studied, and I resolved to learn as much as I could.

The waters I sailed through were oftentimes tumultuous. But I also found kindness, and people who were similar to me, and it opened a range of possibilities for being.

I hope you find my glorious and, somehow, triumphant crawls through the chiffon trenches to be fierce and fearless. I am now in my seventies, but mentally I feel like I am twenty-nine. Physically, I am a huge galleon slowly sailing into harbor, broken from so many battles. But still, I rise, and continue to express myself with articulation, eloquence, and respect. I bow down to no one and find my way through the memory of what has been good in this life, which is not yet finished. My past gives me strength.

Photograph by Arthur Elgort

I

I was born in a now-torn-down hospital on the edge of tony, affluent Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Two months after my arrival, my parents, Alma and William Carroll Talley, took me to my grandmother’s house in Durham, North Carolina, the center of the tobacco industry. My parents were young, and as was typical in Southern black households, it was decided I would live with my grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, as my parents sought careers in the nation’s capital. I called my grandmother Mama.

Mama and I lived with my great-grandmother China. Both widows, they coupled pension checks and my grandmother’s salary from being a domestic maid at the men’s campus of Duke University, as well as supplemental income from my parents, to make a house that operated on organization, faith, God, and maintenance. As a young child I was given duties: dusting, collecting coal for the stoves, and gathering kindling from the woodshed, as well as washing dishes after meals.

There was churchgoing, and there was churchgoing: Sunday school; vacation Bible school; homecoming celebrations; baptisms in the rain-filled concrete pool constructed just beyond the churchyard cemetery.

I went to Lyon Park elementary school, which was just down the street from our home. I had close family bonds and my favorite cousins were my best friends. Most of the time, I managed to avoid the cruel bullies at school and in the neighborhood. I do, however, remember vividly staying home from school on a rare snow day and proudly building a three-tiered snowman in our front yard, complete with coal eyes, a carrot nose, and coal lips. I went into the kitchen at lunchtime, where my great-grandmother China was heating up a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup for me. By the time I put on my coat and returned outside, the neighborhood kids had destroyed my freshly constructed snowman. I turned around, went back inside, and sulked. What could I do? My grandmother’s mother couldn’t come out and take up my defense, and I had no desire to chase down and confront the vandals.

Young people can be very mean. When I would get upset, my uncle Lewis used to say to me, “Just keep on getting up. Get up every day and just keep going.” It was some of the best advice I’ve ever been given.

At an early age, I found my fantasy world in books and records, classical music, Nina Simone, Laura Nyro, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross. In my aunt Myra’s country house, I found a book on the disaster of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that was never supposed to sink. The wealthy and the middle-class went to their deaths in the cold seas. Every time I went to visit Aunt Myra, I picked up this book; it resonated as something in my mind’s eye that was outside the norm of my everyday existence.

My favorite retreat was the city library in downtown Durham, North Carolina. By the age of twelve, I had read every magazine and book I had come across. My world became the glossy pages of Vogue, where I could read about Truman Capote’s legendary ball, given at the Plaza, in honor of Katharine Graham. And Gloria Vanderbilt, in her patchwork antique quilts with Elizabethan ruffs, created by Adolfo. I loved seeing her photographed in her simple Mainbocher suits or the exotic Fortuny pleated gowns she kept folded in special coils, like snakes, to keep the silk vibrant. I dreamed of meeting Naomi Sims and Pat Cleveland, and living a life like the ones I saw in the pages of Vogue, where bad things never happened. Blue spring skies lent my grandmother’s rosebushes a glorious color in our front yard. Summers were spent picking wild blackberries, watching cardinals zoom around our house, and having wonderful, delicious dinners, cooked all day and eaten at five-thirty. Food was our luxury—simple, good, home-cooked food. Every day, there were fresh-cooked homemade meals. Sometimes we ate leftovers, but I remember Sundays, when hot, fresh beaten buttermilk biscuits; rows of crisp bacon; scrambled eggs; and preserves made our breakfast. Cake, pie, and a myriad of home-cooked desserts were my favorites.

Autumn brought with it crisp, crinkly golden leaves from the maple tree, a massive one in our front yard, its leaves awful to rake. In the winter, if it snowed, I had to gather extra buckets of glossy chunks of coal in the scuttle and store them on the back porch.

Great-Grandmother China died in January 1961, and I felt alone for the first time. For a budding young man, this was overwhelming, the death scene of my great-grandmother, a lady who was the matriarch of a God-fearing and God-loving family.

The family gathered at Aunt Pete’s, and she made enough food to feed everyone, including her seven daughters, one surviving son, and assorted extended family members. Throughout the night, into the morning, the adults were in the family room, sharing stories of growing up and of their beloved mama.

Somehow, there was an economy of words between my grandmother and me as we shared this humble, modest household, filled with nurturing love and the greatest values: treating others with kindness, and caring for your neighbors and family.

Life went on. My parents divorced when I was nine. Nobody told me about their separation, but I eventually figured it out. Both of them continued to visit frequently, my father always bringing me some luxurious gift: a bright red brand-new bicycle, the World Book encyclopedia, a black and white television, or my first record player. I had an allowance and would go to downtown Durham on Fridays with Mama and purchase the latest 45 rpm records. I treasured each of the items he gave me.

My mother had left my father because she thought she could do better and had planned to marry another man who was slightly more affluent than my father. One morning, not long after the divorce, she got an invitation to that man’s wedding, to another, younger, woman. That broke my mother’s spirit, forever. She became ill after that. Her hair turned white, prematurely, and she had a sort of meltdown that resulted in her trying to set her apartment on fire. And on top of it all, she refused even the smallest amount of alimony she was entitled to by law. She simply handed him the way out of their marriage and soldiered on financially but became cruel and bitter emotionally. She would come visit us in Durham, and she would go to church and be part of everything, but there was never much of a conversation to be had between the two of us. I would talk to her, but she barely said anything back. While I knew she loved me, I don’t think she liked me.

Like most Americans, my grandmother and I watched the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy, as it was a defining moment in a new era for our country. It symbolized hope and it also symbolized glamour. Jackie Kennedy was the youngest First Lady and she was an influencer—perhaps the first influencer of the modern world. I was in awe of her, the way she walked at the inauguration, in her cloth coat. I was obsessed with her pillbox hat, and her little snippet of fur at the collar, and her fur-edged boots, as well as the muff she carried to keep her hands warm during the freezing-cold January day.

My captivation continued when on Valentine’s Day, in 1962, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy aired in black and white on all the networks. I was so caught up with the sheer magnitude of this glance inside the First Home of our nation. Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, and her style, truly resonated with me. I knew I had witnessed a moment, one that was sure to be the beginning of many.

There she stood, hair perfectly coiffed and curled, in her Chez Ninon line-for-line copy of an original Dior from Paris. She spoke of the White House with knowledge and eloquence. It was then I learned the word “Porthault”; the Parisian linen firm had donated a long white tablecloth for the State Dining Room, hand-embroidered in gold thread. I learned that she wanted simple glasses for water and wine. She revealed she had found them in Virginia. She spoke of the Stanford White moldings, painted white, from 1902. And she recalled that Teddy Roosevelt had commissioned a fireplace surrounded in marble, with images of American buffaloes.

From her quiet, elegant manner of speaking, her control of her message, her focus on the history of this great edifice, I learned my passion and love for antiques and the finer things. So in life, I followed Jackie Kennedy. She was my heroine in all things that mattered: clothes, decorating, and the way she presented herself as First Lady. My aunts copied her style, according to their budget, with pillbox hats and elegant chain-strap handbags. Gloves, of course. All respectful Negro church ladies were inspired by Jackie Kennedy (“Negro” was the proper term then; “African American” is proper today).

My grandmother had a drawer full of gloves, her most luxurious accessory, for every season of the year. Another drawer held cherished handkerchiefs, which she slipped into her Sunday handbag. Mama wore medium-heeled shoes, which fascinated me to watch on our walk to church, especially her navy blue leather ones, with the grosgrain bow, by Naturalizer, bought at great expense, and with a matching handbag.

The orchestrated funeral of President John F. Kennedy was the most incredible pageantry of dignity. There was Mrs. Kennedy, in her black Givenchy suit, with the tassel fringe as buttons, her face covered by a veil attached to her pillbox. It was a message to the world that she was a mother and a wife, and created a symbol of strength and style. Jackie Kennedy seemed more like a film star than the wife of the president. She had more impact on me than any actress.

I created my fantasy world through Jackie Kennedy. A hefty diet of fashion glossies and fashion supplements taught me everything I needed to know.

I knew about Jansen, the Paris-based decorator, and Monsieur Boudin, who helped C. Z. Guest, this über-Wasp icon of style and affluence, decorate her rooms.

I knew about Bunny Mellon, who lived in Upperville, Virginia, the best friend of Jackie Kennedy.

I knew about Lee, Princess Radziwill, sister to Jackie Kennedy, living a gilded life in London, with a house in the country decorated with the help of Mongiardino of Italy. I remember so fondly making mental pictures of Lee Radziwill, dancing in her silver Mila Schön couture dress at the Truman Capote Black and White Ball.

With the massive influence of fashion magazines, I became a devoted Francophile. My favorite show on television was Julia Child’s, on Sundays. I loved her irreverence, and I loved her manner of speaking French. I took four levels of French, from junior to senior high school, and I majored in French studies at North Carolina Central University, a Negro state university in Durham. There, I excelled, and received a full scholarship to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where I would receive my master’s degree and begin pursuing doctoral studies. My plan was to become a French teacher, at a private school somewhere. I didn’t much mind where; I just knew I wanted to be out in the world.

On the very day I was going off for graduate school at Brown, with a full advanced-degree scholarship, my mother turned to me and whispered, “I don’t know why you are going off to this college for another few years of studies. You have your BA. Why don’t you go and join the army so you can have benefits?”

I thought to myself, What is she talking about? Brown’s an Ivy League school. She didn’t understand what a high honor I had achieved.

My grandmother overheard this whispered conversation and bullied her way right through the cracks. She said to her daughter, “Just leave it alone, he will be fine. Let him go!” Mama understood and always encouraged and supported me all the way. She had faith and knew it was going to be fine; she just kept packing my cardboard boxes with quilts made by her mother’s sister, Aunt Luna, that I cherished for my dormitory room, as well as sheets and towels. It was modest, but that soon changed once I got to Brown and had a monthly stipend, with which I splurged on Yves Saint Laurent sheets, lengthy brand-stamped lush yellow towels, and Rive Gauche clothes, on sale.

At Brown I studied the culture of France, the brilliant, intellectual bohemian lifestyle of the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine. I felt free, no longer restrained by the rigid, judgmental community I had grown up in. Now that I was out in the world, I didn’t give a damn what anyone thought about me. I wore a vintage surplus navy admiral’s coat, in perfect condition. All the brass buttons were intact. It was a maxi, almost to my feet, and I’d wear it with scratchy sailor pants—four inches above the ankles—and lace-up oxfords with small flamenco-dancer heels.

During the first winter break, I brought the coat home to North Carolina. I was so proud of that coat. My grandmother could not have cared less, but my mother refused to attend church with me while I was wearing it. As we got out of my cousin Doris Armstrong’s car—she always drove across town to pick us up and take us to our country church—my mother held me back.

She glared at me and said, “I can’t be seen walking with you up the aisle in this Phantom of the Opera look.”

“Go ahead,” I said. I waited outside a few minutes while she went in, smarting from her comment. My mother could be quite nasty to me, but I still respected her. That did not mean I had to like her.

I was a fashion addict, dramatic in attire and appearance, even then. I would wear kabuki makeup like Diana Vreeland, legendary Vogue editor in chief, or Naomi Sims, the first black model I ever saw in Vogue. On any typical day, I would layer Estée Lauder’s latest shade of deep grape on my temples, top it with Vaseline, and head off to class.

My wardrobe caught the attention of affluent students at the Rhode Island School of Design, also located in Providence. I began to live two separate lives: the one on campus for my studies at Brown, and the one at RISD, where I made friends with Jane Kleinman and Reed Evins. Jane’s father was then head of Kayser-Roth hosiery, and Reed’s uncle was David Evins, the shoe magnate. They lived off campus, in a big floor-through apartment filled with sunlight and incredible antiques. Reed came to RISD with a huge van of furniture. There were Chippendale dining room chairs, a beautiful mahogany leaf dining table, Baccarat glassware, sterling flatware, damask tablecloths, and beautiful china with gold-leaf borders.

One weekend, Jane went home to New York City and came back to school with a Revillon skunk coat purchased on sale at Saks Fifth Avenue. She was so proud of that coat. It was the exact same coat Babe Paley owned, South American skunk—Chilean skunk, in fact. Diana Vreeland’s favorite!

Reed and Jane ruled: They seemed to have it all—the best clothes, the best furniture—and they were New Yorkers. On my birthday in October 1974, they brought me to New York to attend the Coty Awards fashion show, at FIT. I don’t remember anything about the show, except meeting Joe Eula, who was an important illustrator for Halston, then the hottest designer in America. Joe Eula invited me to a party at his house after the show, where I met Elsa Peretti, as well as Carrie Donovan, with whom I had corresponded years earlier.

Carrie was a madcap and very talented fashion editor, a cross between Kay Thompson in Funny Face (the best fashion comedy film ever) and Maggie Smith in a movie that won her an Oscar, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I absolutely adored Carrie’s boutique pages at the back of Vogue.

I walked up to Carrie Donovan and introduced myself. “You wrote me a letter,” I said, and reminded her that I had written to Vogue, inquiring as to who had discovered the model Pat Cleveland. Carrie had written me back and said it was she who had discovered Pat Cleveland on the Lexington Avenue subway, traveling to work one morning. The note was brief but beautiful, typewritten and signed in electric-green ink.

Carrie was warm and gracious, and told me to stay in touch. “And if you want to work in fashion, you have to come to New York,” she said.

As soon as I arrived back in Providence, I made plans to abandon my studies at Brown and move to New York. I already had my master’s but was working on my doctoral thesis, with plans to become a French teacher. While I’d been recommended for teaching positions at private schools up and down the East Coast, I was unable to procure a job. I was eager to see what awaited me in New York and in the world of fashion.

Reed had finished his studies at RISD and already moved back to Manhattan. He offered to let me stay with him until I got myself situated. In one large soft Louis Vuitton zipper satchel, I packed my most precious items: my navy coat, two pairs of velvet Rive Gauche trousers, two silk Rive Gauche shirts, and my first bespoke black silk faille smoking shoes, custom-made by Reed Evins himself. They were blunt-toed slip-ons, lined in flaming red.

Jane Kleinman’s father wrote me a letter of introduction to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Diana Vreeland was hiring volunteers to assist with her curation of an epic exhibit: Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design.

The letter worked and I was hired, with no salary. I didn’t care; I was going to meet Diana Vreeland, the grandest and most important fashion empress! The famed editor in chief of Vogue for almost ten years! Considered to be one of the great fashion editors of all time! Running the Costume Institute was Vreeland’s dream job and my own dream apprenticeship. It was highly selective; there were only about twelve of us.

My first day as a volunteer, I was handed a shoebox filled with metal discs and a pair of needle-nose pliers.

“Fix this,” I was told.

“What is it?”

“It’s the chain mail dress worn by Miss Lana Turner in The Prodigal. Mrs. Vreeland will be here shortly to inspect your work.”

Left to my own devices, I laid out all the pieces and quickly figured out the complex puzzle pattern. Eventually I was able to craft the shoebox of metal back into a dress.

“Who did this?” Mrs. Vreeland asked.

“The new volunteer.”

“Follow me,” she said, and I did. We went into her office, where she sat down and wrote my name in large letters. “HELPER,” she wrote underneath it, and handed the paper to me. “You will stay by my side night and day, until the show is finished! Let’s go, kiddo. Get crackin’!”

Mrs. Vreeland spoke in narratives, in staccato sentences. You had to figure out what she wanted. The next dress she assigned to me was from Cleopatra, worn by Claudette Colbert. “You must remember, André, white peacocks, the sun, and this is a girl of fourteen, who is a queen. Now get crackin’! Right-o!”

It was a gold lamé dress. I spray-painted the mannequin the same color gold.

“Right-o, right-o, I say, André!” Mrs. Vreeland responded.

Over the next six weeks I became one of Mrs. Vreeland’s favorite volunteers in what was really like a fine fashion finishing school. Through Diana Vreeland I learned to speak the language of style, fantasy, and literature.

I listened to and I learned from Mrs. Vreeland. I hung on her every word, every utterance. I towered above her physically, but I was utterly respectful and properly reverent, and she in turn treated me with great respect.

In 1974, my first year in New York, I was a volunteer for Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute. She and I spoke the same language of style, fantasy, history, and literature. Here we are assigning silver hairnets from Woolworth’s to cover what Mrs. Vreeland called the “hideous” faces of the mannequins.

Photograph © The Bill Cunningham Foundation. All rights not specifically granted herein are hereby reserved to the Licensor

She must have loved the idea of my presence, the combination of my looks, tall and honey colored; my impeccable manners and grooming; and my blossoming unorthodox style. Plus my master’s degree!

After the exhibit’s opening night in December, I needed a job. I tried working as a receptionist at the ASPCA but it was too tragic. Mrs. Vreeland called me into her office late one afternoon, just before taking off for the Christmas holiday season.

“Don’t go home to Durham, André!” Vreeland pronounced. “If you go home to the South, you will get a teaching job of course, but you will never come back to New York. It will happen for you, just sit tight and don’t run home.”

“But I have no money, I need a job!”

“Stick it out! You belong in New York. Do not go home for Christmas!” With that I was dismissed, and she was off to the beautiful home of Oscar and Françoise de la Renta in Santo Domingo.

Christmas Eve 1974 turned out to be one of the darkest nights of my life. I had no money, and I was sleeping on the floor of the studio of my friend Robert Turner, a fellow volunteer. He was out of town for the holiday. I slept on a horse blanket, found at a local thrift shop, and a borrowed pillow from his platform bed. There was nothing left in the refrigerator and not one cent strewn around for a greasy hamburger.

I opened the cupboards and found a can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, which I devoured with a fine silver teaspoon and followed with glasses of water to chase the thick, dense syrup down.

The phone rang at ten P.M. It was my grandmother.

“Ray”—she never called me André—“your father is here next to me. I am sending him to drive through the night and bring you home. You need to be ready, because he will be there tomorrow, on Christmas Day. You come home. You belong home. You have never been away from home at Christmas.”

I insisted I wasn’t about to come home. Mrs. Vreeland had said it would happen for me in the New Year! Mama hadn’t put up an argument when I left for Brown; why was she so adamant now?

So I asked her, “Why? Why do you want me to come home so urgently?”

Silence. Pause. Then she shouted into the telephone: “Come home, because I know you are sleeping with a white woman up there!”

That was the furthest thing from reality. I laughed out loud and assured her this was not the case. She uttered something and hung up the phone. I knew she was upset, but I had faith in Mrs. Vreeland.

During that long and lonely Christmas week, I visited Saint Thomas, an Episcopal church, often. There I would meditate and pray for my parents and my grandmother, and thank God for the gifts and opportunities I had been given. I was grateful to be in New York, even if my future was uncertain. I was confident that my faith and my knowledge would see me through, even if my stomach continued to rumble.

All staffers of Warhol’s Factory and Interview magazine: Fred Hughes, Peter Lester (center), and Andy Warhol, seated at a Halston fashion show in 1975.

Photograph © The Bill Cunningham Foundation. All rights not specifically granted herein are hereby reserved to the Licensor

II

First thing in January, Diana Vreeland wrote letters on my behalf to every important figure in fashion journalism. Like a trumpet, with her booming voice, she built me up to everyone. Halston, Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, Carolina Herrera, all her friends; she never let up speaking on my behalf.

She also made sure I was invited to all the right parties, including Halston’s legendary soirees, attended by anyone who was anyone in New York: Liza Minnelli, Martha Graham, Bianca Jagger, Elsa Peretti, Diane von Fürstenberg, and the entire Warhol upper echelon. I was there one night with Tonne Goodman, another favorite volunteer of Mrs. Vreeland’s and a well-connected New Yorker herself. As we dragged along the pale-carpeted floors, Fred Hughes, right-hand man and business partner to Andy Warhol, came up to me. “André, do you think you could come to the Factory and meet with Andy and Bob? Diana Vreeland says we must have you work with us.”

I of course said, “When do you want me? I’ll be there.”

The following Monday, I began my career as an assistant for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. I moved off my friend’s floor and into a small room at the Twenty-third Street YMCA, where I battled numerous cockroaches in the public showers, real ones and human ones.

Interview was a lean office, adjacent to the big Factory space, where Andy’s loyal staff worked at a long makeshift desk in the open reception area. There was the elegant boiserie-paneled boardroom, where Andy took his lunch. His workspace, or his artist’s studio, was the entire length of the floor, divided by a wall just behind the Interview offices.

Fred Hughes set the tone. He was the sum total of elegance, with hair like Tyrone Power and a definite snobbish Continental accent. Diana Vreeland loved him, and it was rumored that she considered him her beau.

The space was clean and light filled. Huge Jean Dupas art deco posters hung throughout. The whole atmosphere was lighthearted, but in a serious kind of way. We were expected to be at work on time and no one spent hours on the telephone social networking. My job was really just to be a glorified receptionist, buzzing visitors through the bulletproof steel door Andy had put in and taking messages for all the freelance talents. My duties, which included picking lunch up for Andy at the local health food store Brownies, started at twelve noon and ended at six P.M.

Everyone was freelance, so people were always coming in and out and you never knew who you were going to see on any given day. Fran Lebowitz made regular appearances. Her major bestseller, Metropolitan Life, had just come out. She’d walk in, very serious, chain-smoking, and ask for her messages. She was intimidating. A great intellect and succinct in verbal sparring.

No one messed with Fran. Not even Andy. Everyone was afraid she would torch the place. Metaphorically. Her grumpiness was part of her façade. Fran praised me, saying I was the only receptionist who took the job seriously and actually wrote down accurate messages.

Fred Hughes liked having society ladies flitting about the office, not doing much of anything. They served as ornamentation. Catherine Guinness, of the Guinness beer fortune, was working on a piece exploring the underworld of sadomasochism with her gay friends. She would wear leather jackets to the office, playing around with whips and things like that.

Fred always wore bespoke everything, including tennis-stripe jackets and skinny jacquard silk ties. His shoes were polished, the way English dukes polish the same pair of shoes for decades until they become like soft gloves for the feet. Fred’s apartment was decorated with first-rate antiques, and he let his house become a bed-and-breakfast for all the young ladies who wanted to be part of the scene. Some would stay indefinitely. Everything was kept in a state of pitch-perfect perfection, including Fred’s highbrow fake English accent, hysterical considering he was from Houston, Texas. His mannerisms, his dandyisms, his snobbism were toxic to my budget but auspicious for my aspirations.

Casual dress was the regular uniform, which made it easy for me to create a distinctive imprint. I wore fine vintage topcoats, found in a local thrift shop on Fifty-fifth Street for ten bucks, and tweed trousers, never jeans, as I never felt comfortable in a pair of jeans.

Mrs. Vreeland would often take a taxi down to the Factory for lunch. On those days, sandwiches would be ordered from Poll’s on Lexington Avenue: chicken on brown bread, and a small shot of Dewar’s for Mrs. Vreeland, her healthy tonic. Just a shot glass at lunch and that was it. It was a different time.

One day, Mrs. Vreeland came to the Factory with Gloria Schiff, a great beauty and twin sister to Consuelo Crespi, Italian editor for American Vogue. I overheard them having a highly pitched debate: “Gloria, what do you mean you discovered Marisa Berenson at a debutante ball!” exclaimed the imperial Vreeland. It was, in fact, Vreeland who had put Marisa Berenson on the map, having seen her at Elsa Schiaparelli’s house in Paris! Elsa was Marisa’s grandmother, and Elsa never forgave Mrs. Vreeland for introducing her to the world of high-fashion modeling.

For all that I made seventy-five dollars a week; the social life that came along with it was surely priceless.

When it came time to assign fashion stories, I was the go-to fashionista in the office. My knowledge and passion in this area were recognized and I was quickly promoted to fashion editor. I now had the opportunity to interview some of the most exciting stars of society, fashion, and international jet-set acclaim, including Carolina Herrera, the elegant designer from Caracas, Venezuela, who later dressed Jackie Kennedy when she lived in New York. I did Carolina’s first official interview, in a lavish spread.

Bianca Jagger was my favorite stylish subject. It was her time; she had wed Mick in the south of France, wearing an Yves Saint Laurent suit and a sweeping portrait hat with a veil. The Rolling Stones were playing at Madison Square Garden and Andy sent me to the Pierre hotel to pick up Bianca, and her wardrobe, and bring them to the studio to be photographed for a cover. Bianca answered the door and motioned to me to walk quietly. Mick was asleep. We tiptoed around the rock star to the huge walk-in closet off the bedroom suite. Quietly, we piled up her beautiful clothes and her favorite shoes that season, Charles Jourdan espadrilles on a high wedge sole. She had a half dozen of that same ankle-wrap wedge platform sole, in an array of colors.

All of this was packed in tissue and layered in extraordinary Louis Vuitton cases, unlike any I had previously seen. They were actually custom-made hunting cases, used to pack guns for grouse shoots. Because of the length, she could pack her Zandra Rhodes crinoline evening gowns flat, no folds, in these coffinlike cases. She had bought them in Paris, at the avenue Marceau Louis Vuitton store.

Bianca and I took a taxi, piled high with her Vuitton luggage. We bonded over our deep admiration for her friend the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, and we went on to become friends.

When it came to having access to the elite echelon, Andy provided it, taking me everywhere I wanted to go, from dinners at Mortimer’s to movie premieres in subway stations. I met everyone at some movie premiere—C. Z. Guest, Caroline of Monaco, Grace Jones, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

With Andy, anyone could be anyone and everyone was equal—a drag queen or an heiress. At the Factory, if you were interesting, you were “in.” And while he could be seen out and about at night, Andy also went to church every morning to thank God for his life, his money, and his mother.

Andy could be naughty. He could also be vicious, but never to me. From time to time he would put his pale white hands in my crotch (always in public, never in private) and I would just swat him away, the way I did annoying flies in summer on my front porch in the South. Once, we went to see an afternoon movie with Azzedine Alaïa on the Upper East Side and Andy kept grabbing me. Every time, I would scream out, “Andy!” Azzedine was in hysterical tears. Andy was naïve; nothing he did offended me. He saw the world through the kaleidoscope colors of a child. He was a kind person, and I considered him a very dear friend, too.

When Andy was in a good mood, he created small, signed pieces of art for his staff. A silkscreen print from one of his series, or a small painting, like a candy heart in lace on Valentine’s Day. It was a quite generous perk.

While creating his so-called Oxidation paintings, aka the “piss paintings,” Andy asked me to participate.

Instantly I said, “No thank you, Andy.” All I could think of was my grandmother, or my mother, or father, hearing about me. Peeing for art? It would have broken Mama’s heart to think that although I was living a successful, adventurous life in New York, I was spending my time creating paintings with urine.

Andy also asked me to participate in the Sex Parts paintings. We were in Interview editor Bob Colacello’s office and Andy said, “Gee, André, just think, Victor Hugo is doing it. You could become famous, make your cock famous. All you have to do is let me take a Polaroid of you peeing on the canvas. And I will give you one as a gift.”

Victor Hugo the writer is not whom Andy was referring to, but rather Victor Hugo the male escort, who was Halston’s lover. Handsome, from Venezuela, notoriously well-endowed, and possessed of beautiful skin, he was also a window display artist for the Halston boutique and had apparently now somehow gotten a gig at the Factory, doing these outpourings of overt sexual exploration.

Was his name really Victor Hugo? No, of course not. There was nothing really remotely Victor Hugo about Victor Hugo. He never quoted the literary giant. He never spoke about him. He didn’t subscribe to literary brilliance. But he did piss on a canvas for Andy Warhol, and his penis did indeed become famous.

Andy loved hanging around with Victor and often included him in his Factory workshop life. I knew him well, but I was not witness to his thrusting full, erect penises into his mouth in a working session with Andy, while others were going about their duties, putting out Interview.

As ghastly as it seemed, at some point Andy did indeed elevate pornography, or pornographic interests, through Victor Hugo. (For the record, I have no doubt: Andy never had sex with Hugo, except with his Polaroid and his art.)

Victor invented himself as an artist, as a disrupter, as a unique individual in New York’s cultural mix. One of his Halston windows featured a hospital tableau, with a woman giving birth in a Halston dress. He once had a live chicken dipped into liquid the color of blood and left it alone to walk along the corridor, the white-carpeted corridor, of Halston’s East Side Paul Rudolph townhouse. Just to “shock” Halston. It worked; he was shocked.

American designer Norma Kamali worked on Madison Avenue and befriended Victor. He would pass by nearly every day. One day, Norma was draping a new swimsuit; the next day, the design had been leaked and ended up as a Halston original on page 1 of Women’s Wear Daily. Norma confronted Victor, who responded like a naughty child, caught doing something forbidden.

Later, he was forgiven: Victor arrived in Norma’s studio with a gift—huge surplus silk parachutes. She skillfully turned them into high fashion, jackets, shirred trousers, ball gowns, and jumpsuits, with the pull releases intact. Diana Vreeland later insisted they be included in her Vanity Fair Costume Institute exhibit. Norma turned defeat into victory!

One night around this same time, Reed Evins and I were houseguests of Calvin Klein at his home on Fire Island, in the elegant Pines section. We ended up sharing a bed, and as we were falling asleep, Victor came in and crashed on top of us. Uninvited. He fell asleep like a bear in winter hibernation. Reed and I, curious about the legendary size of his penis, pulled back the white sheet and exposed the family jewels, which Reed described as the size of “a Schaller and Weber salami.” It was uncircumcised is all I remember. That night, we slept with Reed in the middle, Victor on one end, and me on the other.

In 1975, Karl Lagerfeld was already head creative designer at Chloé and perched to take his place at the top of the fashion world. Chloé had been a staid, bourgeois house for housewives who could afford good ready-to-wear in Paris. After Karl got there, Chloé became extremely influential. Grace Mirabella, who had replaced Mrs. Vreeland as editor in chief of Vogue, was married in a Chloé white turtleneck blouse, embroidered with pearls. That was a big thing—to pick a Chloé look, as opposed to an Yves Saint Laurent.

Prêt-à-porter, aka ready-to-wear, was taking off, and Karl always had a knack for delivering bizarrely innovative clothes that were unanimously acclaimed by retailers and press alike. He’d make a print with robots and space mobiles and turn it into a $1,000 dress. His jewelry could be big plastic red roosters or chickens, or plastic Magic Marker–colored tulips on a necklace, over a luxurious foundation, like a black redingote wool coat, exquisite and expensive, made to last through generations.

The clothes were surreal and sophisticated, but most important, they were youthful and inspired. This was represented in Karl’s approach to the Chloé fashion shows. They purposefully didn’t have an assigned lineup of models and outfits. Backstage, Karl would tell the models to pick whatever they wanted to wear from the rack. That is unheard of even to this day, where shows are micromanaged down to the smallest details. After the show, he’d tell the models to keep the clothes they’d worn. They didn’t make that much money at that time and this was a way of saying thank you.

Interview was planning a Paris-themed issue, and Karl was due in New York to promote his new Chloé fragrance. Karl had never been profiled for Interview before, and Andy suggested that I conduct the interview, for which I am forever grateful.

I did everything I could to prepare for meeting Karl. Serious research. I knew Karl was influenced by eighteenth-century French style and that he was emulating it in his own personal life. As a longtime Francophile I knew the basics, but I dug deeper to prepare. I read every interview he had done and researched as many of the references he’d made as possible.

When we arrived at the Plaza, we were directed upstairs to a large suite. I sat down across from Karl in the living room, my notebook ready. Members of Lagerfeld’s entourage floated in and out of the bedrooms. Seated next to him was his boyfriend, the handsome and debonair Jacques de Bascher. Andy and Fred Hughes had accompanied me, as well as famed fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, friends of Lagerfeld’s who had just returned from Paris to take up residence in New York. Antonio was creating visuals for the Paris Interview issue. In previous years, Antonio’s creative energy had helped drive Karl Lagerfeld. Now there was a noticeable chill between them. I wondered what the story was but focused instead on what I had come to do.

Lagerfeld was bearded and dressed in a bespoke crêpe de chine shirt and a six-foot-long muffler. I had on khaki Bermuda shorts, a pin-striped shirt and aviator glasses from Halston, knee socks, and moccasin penny loafers. We spoke about the eighteenth century: the style, the culture, the carpets, the people, the women, the dresses, the way the French entertained, set a table. It wasn’t labored or anything especially deep, but I learned a lot in that conversation and was grateful for the knowledge.

“Fashion’s fun and you can’t really take it too seriously. Frivolity must be an integral form,” Karl said to me. As we spoke, Antonio drew us, while Juan directed him on the right position and attitudes to convey. Andy and Fred sat quietly, the minutiae of proper attire in an eighteenth-century court likely going right over their heads. How exhilarating, being able to prove myself to Andy and his team as they sat quietly and listened. Karl seemed impressed by my desire to learn and gave me a great interview. My Southern manners helped, I’m sure. It would be easy to imagine how cocky and brash a young editor at Interview had the potential to be.

Afterward, we all had high tea. The whole thing was so elegant. Then, quietly, Karl asked me to follow him into his private bedroom.

Andy smiled widely and shyly, as though he couldn’t imagine what this was. I smiled too, nervously. I could imagine, but I was trying my hardest not to.

I followed Karl into the huge bedroom, crowded with Goyard jacquard trunks and suitcases of every possible size and dimension. He opened the trunks and, out like a geyser spitting forth toxic ash, he threw beautiful silk crêpe de chine shirts in kelly green and pink peony, each with a matching scarf.

“Take this. It will look good on you. Take that. I am tired of these shirts! You should have them.” He’d had these shirts specially made by the gross at the Paris firm of London haberdashery Hilditch & Key. They had long sleeves and beautiful buttons, like smocks. I took them happily.

Those shirts were the stars of my wardrobe; I wore them like a badge of honor, until they wore out. That’s how Karl and I first met. We would stay friends for forty years. Until we weren’t.

III

Andy poached Rosemary “Armenia” Kent from Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and made her editor in chief of Interview. Rosemary lasted about a year, but Mr. John Fairchild, whose Fairchild Publications owned WWD, held a grudge for much longer. A mandate had been handed down—no pictures of Andy or Fred would run in WWD. Everybody from Interview was exiled.

John Fairchild, the king of fashion journalism, the master of WWD, and the inventor of W, could be cruel. Downright bloodthirsty. His rancor was all-consuming. For example, Valentino, early in his career, gave Rosemary Kent exclusive access to cover his vacation. Subsequently, Valentino decided not to invite her back. For that, Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, were airbrushed out of photographs at parties. If Mr. Fairchild couldn’t get Valentino’s face out, he would resort to assigning the generic label of “an Italian designer” to the caption.

Carrie Donovan, who was now the fashion editor of The New York Times, called me and said I should get over to Women’s Wear Daily. There was an opening. I was interviewed by WWD’s Michael Coady on a Friday and was offered a job as fashion accessories editor, covering scarves, belts, earrings, jewelry, and ancillary social nightcrawling of New York fashion society.

With Oscar de la Renta, in his showroom. Back then, I didn’t have a lot of money for fashion. I wore Bermuda shorts and knee socks to make my style statement. That hat is by Karl Lagerfeld and the shirt also. We are drinking white wine, which was served after fashion presentations in the Golden Age of Fashion.

© Thomas Iannaccone

The following week I started at a super salary: $22,000 a year. A massive leap from my $75 a week at Interview. I called my grandmother, my mother, and my father to share the good news. They were extremely happy, even if they didn’t quite understand what my job was.

Mr. Fairchild poached me, his revenge for losing Rosemary Kent; that’s how the fashion world runs. I’d worked at Interview for eight months and experienced some incredible moments in that brief tenure. I was grateful for everything Andy had done for me, but I knew this was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down if I wanted to pursue a career in fashion journalism. While I knew it might anger Mr. Fairchild, I planned on staying friends with Andy, knowing we would have to keep it on the down low if I wanted to keep my new job.

Photograph by André Leon Talley for WWD page one. Betty Catroux, Thadée Klossowski, and Loulou de la Falaise in New York.

Photo by André Leon Talley

My first day at WWD, I arrived confidently wearing my hand-me-down silk tunics and mufflers from Karl, with a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt and gray custom-tailored glen plaid trousers, with zoot suit–sized cuffs and wide hems. Mr. Fairchild didn’t say hello or acknowledge my existence. I would have to earn his greeting.

WWD was considered the fashion bible by most, which therefore made Mr. Fairchild a kind of god. He could destroy a designer by refusing to cover them. Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s business and life partner, would pick Mr. Fairchild up himself at the airport when he came to Paris. No chauffeur-driven ride would do. And Saint Laurent always gave Mr. Fairchild an exclusive private preview of his collection. For some (Bill Blass, Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta), Mr. Fairchild was a kingmaker. But many others (Geoffrey Beene, James Galanos, Pauline Trigère) had long-standing feuds with him, and their careers suffered because of it.

He was cruel and vicious to the late Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, the undisputed social queen of Paris. Marie-Hélène, always elegantly dressed in Saint Laurent or Valentino couture, suffered from a rare debilitating disease, resulting in crippled and deformed hands. It was savage, his personal revenge. Maybe she snubbed Mr. Fairchild at some grand Paris social gala; who knows? For his revenge, he had her body printed on page 1 of WWD, with her face airbrushed out and her deformity in clear view.

During my first few weeks at WWD, I was receiving handwritten letters from Karl Lagerfeld in Paris almost every day. We had bonded during our interview and now kept in touch regularly. Surely that would have gotten Mr. Fairchild’s attention, but still, he did not acknowledge my presence.

Finally, nearly two months after I’d started, Mr. Fairchild started asking me about who I’d seen the previous night, what parties I had attended. He eventually realized I had something to offer and could analyze, report, sum up, and write clean copy, fast. I had no choice. We had daily issues, and content needed to be generated to fill the pages. It was a major newspaper under the leadership of John Fairchild, who had inherited it from his father.

“I am the boss, and don’t you ever forget it,” Mr. Fairchild once said to me as we sat together on the front row in Paris, during haute couture. While he could be intimidating and threatening, I still had so much respect for him. He taught me how to analyze the beat of fashion and the rhythms of the high rollers, the social doers and achievers of the fashion battlefield. “I don’t give a damn about clothes, I care about the people who wear them,” was a phrase he oft repeated. From him I learned how to embrace what was going on around me in 360 degrees. What makes a beautiful dress? Hems, seams, the way it’s put together. The ruffles. How’s the ruffle? How’s the bow tie? What’s the combination of colors, what’s the combination of fabrics? There’s Mounia on the runway, in what? What was Yves’s inspiration? What is the music behind her? And what is the chandelier behind her? And there are roses, why are they there? Why is she wearing that shoe? And what is the lipstick? What is going on in the mind of the designer? That’s my role, taught to me by Mr. Fairchild.

There was no set standard of writing style at WWD, not like The New York Times with its manual that all reporters had to follow. We wrote at a brisk pace, hoping it was all up to Mr. Fairchild’s standard. People at WWD were thrown in the tank and sank or swam, and I just happened to swim.

My first reporting assignment was to cover a party given by Diane von Fürstenberg. She was married to Prince Egon von Fürstenberg. They were the current “it couple,” appearing on the cover of New York magazine. I stood outside of her apartment, having not been able to score an invite to the actual party, along with a bunch of other journalists and photographers. I wore a silver asbestos fireman’s jacket as an evening topcoat as I jotted down the names of all the various people going into the party. I recognized almost everyone; that’s the kind of knowledge I’d gained from reading every issue of Vogue since I was a child.

I soon made it from the sidewalk to the sitting rooms of the plush homes of the fashion elite as they began inviting me into their parties. New York Times fashion editor Bernadine Morris wrote about my attendance at a party thrown by Calvin Klein: “André Talley, reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, wore white Bermuda shorts with a striped high-collared Victorian shirt. Mr. Talley kept telling people that the initials on the pocket were not Kenneth Lane’s but Karl Lagerfeld’s.”

It was the first time my name appeared in a fashion column.

I assume my Southern manners were considered appealing, paired with my knowledge and sense of style. Halston had already gotten to know me quite well from my time at Interview, and he invited me to his house often. He dressed me in his beautiful old castoffs, as I was tall and thin, with the same measurements. Thanks to Halston, I had incredible cashmere sweaters, summer smokings, and five or six Ultrasuede safari jackets that could be thrown in the wash and come out of the drying machine looking perfect, no wrinkles. Halston even sent over an antique Chinese chest, which I used to decorate my room at the Twenty-third Street Y.

Mr. Fairchild saw in me, as Mrs. Vreeland saw in me, that I loved fashion. And for that, a great deal is owed. And after being assigned to write about the legions of friends of Mr. Fairchild, I started to become friends with many of them myself, including the de la Rentas, who took me under their wings like I was an orphan child. When Oscar de la Renta presented his collection, in his narrow showroom, I would be seated on the front row beside Françoise (his first wife). On the other side would be the guest of honor, Diana Vreeland one season, Pat Buckley or Nancy Kissinger another.

During an August resort collection, Françoise turned to me and said, “Now, DéDé, you know Oscar and I are going to build a pool at our country house, in Kent, Connecticut. Don’t you want to be invited to swim in that pool when it’s completed?”

I smiled politely as though I hadn’t quite heard her blatant quid pro quo over the preshow musical arrangement. I never shared that exchange with Mr. Fairchild. The de la Rentas would have suffered.

Mr. Fairchild fueled his viciousness with the details of the parties his editors had gone to the previous evening. I once told him Maxime de la Falaise, a French high society transplant, had complained that Oscar and Françoise de la Renta’s shih tzus had remarkably bad breath. Mr. Fairchild immediately went to his desk and phoned Françoise, to share what I had just told him.

This caused a major scandal. Mr. Fairchild was amused. I got on the phone and told Maxime what had happened, and she asked me what to do. I told her to call Mr. Fairchild directly and ask him what to do. He recommended Maxime send along something special, like her homemade preserves or jelly. She did, and the whole thing cooled off.

I still went out with Andy Warhol sometimes, but I would never tell Mr. Fairchild. He would have been livid. The friendships I made at Interview proved useful and beneficial for Mr. Fairchild’s paper, however.

Bianca Jagger was in New York and invited me to see her at the Pierre hotel. With her was Betty Catroux, one of the permanent icons in the pantheon of Saint Laurent androgynous style. The three of us talked while Bianca ironed her Valentino couture clothes on a board set out between the two twin beds in her room.

The next time Betty came to New York, she called and asked if I’d go shopping with her after lunch. Shopping with the Betty Catroux, the woman who inspired Saint Laurent’s pantsuits? How glamorous.

Or so I thought.

“Meet me at Woolworth’s, I have to buy T-shirts,” Betty said.

As we strolled the Woolworth aisles, I discovered the same hairnets my grandmother wore. Three for twenty-five cents. How fantastic, I thought. World-renowned Betty Catroux, who could freely wear whatever finest-quality designs she wants, buys her clothing from the same place my grandmother buys hairnets!

“Why on earth do you need these Woolworth shirts?” I asked Betty.

“I have to break down the elements of my Saint Laurent couture suits.”

Totally matter-of-fact. All of the beautiful Yves Saint Laurent couture pin-striped suits, Betty wore with T-shirts she bought as a pack of three. Most women would wear a pussycat-bow blouse, but Betty Catroux couldn’t have cared less about what “most women” would do. It was a very original way of thinking at the time.

Betty met Yves in 1967 and it was like lightning. She loved to tell people, “He cruised me in a nightclub.” It began a close brother-sister bond; Yves and Betty, attached at the hip, were the closest of friends. Never officially on the payroll, Betty abhorred fashion. Refused to be a slave to the rhythm of la mode. She had worked as a cabine model for Coco Chanel herself for two years but hated every minute of it. Of the great lady of twentieth-century fashion, Betty told me, “She was a viper, a mean viper. Yves was also mean, two fashion dictators who found everyone else atrocious.”

Be that as it may, Yves wanted to be Betty Catroux. Once they got together, she forever became Yves’s surrogate and alter ego.

Betty always dressed, impeccably, like a man. Tall and lean, throughout her entire adult life. She has never slipped into a full, sweeping evening dress, as best I can recall. She simply refuses. For the grandest ball in Paris, she would ring up the house of Saint Laurent, as she did every day in Yves’s lifetime, after which a little black van with the YSL logo would arrive at her apartment and drop off the look she’d selected, and the same van would pick up the original sample the next morning. This was her routine every day of her life when cocktail or dinner dressing was required.

Betty Catroux is the ultimate rogue, always in vogue. She never wears color, not even red. No prints, ruffles, or flounces. She loves everything black except for those ubiquitous white T-shirts. If she could wear a black leather jacket or biker-style look every day, she would. No jewelry adorns her neck, nor her ears. Her only great accessories are her long, long sheets of platinum hair, airborne once she hits the dance floor. Betty dances like a dazzling rock star in high-gear performance mode.

At times, her look could be interpreted as somewhat “butch.” Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn had already been credited with creating androgyny, but with Betty, it existed spiritually and sartorially. Yves was inspired by Marlene Dietrich, who had gone to her husband’s Austrian tailor to have her pantsuits made for her. But Yves was more directly inspired by Betty and her effortless, impeccable style. With the master touch of Yves, Betty made the evening or le smoking pantsuit an international and global fashion trend. She was, and remains, one of the most influential personalities in high fashion. So many women and men—gay, straight, gender fluid, and transgender—and designers owe much to the Betty/Yves female-dandy style.

Most of the fashion elite, including the top-tier designers—not the established designers, like Bill Blass, Oscar de la Renta, and Ralph Lauren, but the new wave of designers—were working, loving, and living on a regular diet of cocaine, then the drug du jour. Everyone was high on coke and cock.

Halston thrived on it. He was known to partake and afterward stay up and change a whole collection overnight. Presto: a masterpiece. I remember billowing, long grand taffeta evening dresses, floating away from the body, worn over Lycra one-piece leotards. The great Scottish photographer Harry Benson shot them for W, and they are some of the finest illustrations of American high style of the era.

If I went to Françoise de la Renta’s house for dinner, and said I had been to Halston’s, she would tell me that was “the wrong crowd.”

She of course was right. Halston used to have me over for dinner, just the two of us, and he would serve a baked potato with caviar and sour cream. For dessert: a small mountain of high-class cocaine served in an Elsa Peretti sterling silver bowl.

I snorted a line or two, to be polite to my host, and that was it. I never wanted to feel out of my sphere of control. My destiny was not to be hooked on coke. I feared God and my “ancestors as foundation,” to quote Toni Morrison, always lived invisibly on my shoulder.

My only addiction was pure Russian vodka, which I usually drank in Diana Vreeland’s red seraglio. We were always two, elevated by conversation, drinking small shots, one after the other, after dinner, in her dining room. I often left her apartment on weekends at three or four or even six A.M.

I managed to master social nuances between the old guard of fashion, like the de la Rentas, and Halston’s new wave of partying. I glided through this world with extreme caution and my usual armor: my fashion choices. Banana cable knee socks and elegant moccasins. Or Brooks Brothers penny loafers. Neckties, my Karl Lagerfeld castoffs, and Turnbull & Asser shirts. I never spent a dime on drugs. My money was spent on luxury. Massive bouts of high-end retail shopping.

In this, Manolo Blahnik and I were kindred spirits.

Manolo Blahnik, the sum total of human genius in designing shoes for women, invited me to Fire Island one weekend. He arrived with matching sets of Louis Vuitton cases, filled with matching sets of tone-on-tone Rive Gauche shirts and custom-made linen trousers. If he wore a cerulean shirt, he had cerulean linen oxfords. If he wore a geranium-red silk Mao Rive Gauche shirt, then he of course wore matching Fred Astaire linen oxfords.

We went to a pool party where they spiked the punch with something, causing us to have nonstop fits of laughter for nearly fourteen hours. We took a walk along the beach, he in his matching look, me with a big panama hat, a huge Japanese parasol, and a black and white oversize cashmere blanket, wrapped over me like a pareo. We were quite the pair.

The half-nude men in thongs and Speedos near the surf kept screaming at us, laughing at us. “Get off the beach, you faggots. This isn’t the beach for you!”

Next we sauntered off to the woods, as we heard that was where men gathered in full view, to have group sex. There, under a tree, was a circle of men wearing leather chaps and nothing else, participating in group masturbation. It made us both burst out giggling, which caused the participants to boo and hiss at us until we left.

While I enjoyed checking out the scene under the influence of whatever I had been exposed to, when it came to sex, I was repressed. It was a conscious choice I had made. Sex confused and bewildered me. In respectable Southern black households, it was simply not discussed. Physical intimacy of any kind was kept to a bare minimum. I can remember only two times in my childhood when my grandmother hugged me: The first time, in my early teens, was when I had an asthma attack. Then once again, when I was sick, lying on the sofa, she walked over and pulled up a throw blanket to my neck, and hugged me. Mama was not demonstrative of her love, not on a daily basis. She was loving but also stoic, strict, and severe. Too busy washing, ironing, preparing chickens, doing all the daily routines of a humble domestic maid who was also, in essence, a single mom to me.

I grew up with no inkling of what physical intimacy was, my parents long divorced and my grandmother widowed. My interior monologues about romance and love were confused. My only crush, like many others’, was on Anne Bibbie, our high school homecoming queen. While I was in college and at Brown there was no one, no sexual interludes. But in New York sex was impossible to ignore; everyone was doing it and everyone was talking about it. And that forced me to come to terms with something I had long tried to forget.

During my childhood years, my innocence was shattered by a man who lived on the next street. His name was Coke Brown, or at least that was his nickname in the neighborhood. He lured me into the woodshed, directly underneath my wood-framed house, in the damp, dark earth, where he proceeded to take advantage of my youth and my naïveté when it came to sexual encounters. Afterward, as he zipped up his fly, he said, “This is our secret game.”

Was this happening to all the boys my age? I had no idea. I thought this was supposed to happen, and it did happen over and over again, in the dark place, often in daylight. Coke Brown was the first. He must have shared his conquests with others in the neighborhood. A series of older brothers often lured me into their woodsheds as I played innocently with their younger siblings.

Confused and deeply afraid of being discovered, I went about my daily life as if these dark games didn’t exist. As they progressed to frequent interludes, I retreated into my own world of silence. I couldn’t dare tell my grandmother that I had been under the house, in the dark, with a grown man. She would have been devastated, and I would have been shamed. I feared that telling my father, a wonderful man who loved me, would be wrong, and that I would possibly be blamed and sent away to some sort of sanatorium as a result. Or I would be brought before the church deacons and censured, which equaled exile. I felt I had no choice. I kept it all to myself. I simply pushed through the pain and betrayal in silence, never having counsel or seeking psychiatric help. I felt my childhood traumas were little compared to those of the rest of the world.

What saved me from my shame and silence was the sanctuary of church and the sanctuary of my grandmother’s house. But this dark zone of trauma consumed me and stunted my emotional evolution, until I sprouted up like a bean stalk and left for college, far away from my abusers. Somehow, I grew up, and eventually I realized there were others who had experienced the life I had secretly lived.

I survived the destruction and taking of my innocence, though I know it is the cause of many of my personal issues as an adult. The hard drive in my brain was scrambled early on. It kept me from ever knowing how to respond to romance. All I ever wanted up until that point was the approval of Diana Vreeland, Andy Warhol, and John Fairchild.

I shied away from dipping my fingers into the decadent, hedonistic cauldron of New York City, but I enjoyed hearing about it. One person I could always depend on to make me blush was the famous Picasso expert John Richardson. The darling of all of Park Avenue, he was a dashing figure of aristocratic provenance and a close friend of Paloma Picasso and Maxime de la Falaise, as well as Françoise and Annette de la Renta (Oscar’s second wife) and Mica and Ahmet Ertegun. He moved in the best tone-on-high-tone circles. Yet he would tell me debauched stories about his Saturday afternoons at the West Village hard-core club the Anvil, a gay leather bar for men who preferred their sexual pleasure in harnesses, leather chaps, and slings hung from the ceiling. I sustained a long, long crush over the decades on Sir John Richardson. While I never told him about my feelings, his gaze remained intense. We remained good friends until his death in 2019.

Sometimes I’d go to the Anvil or another of these dens of S & M, as a fashionable last-minute visit after a night out on the town. One night, I went with Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev. A black man in crotchless leather pants sidled up beside me and I accidentally made eye contact with him. He began making gestures, rubbing his arm, from his elbow to his wrist, and nodding.

“What is he doing with his hands?” I said.

“He is trying to seduce you,” Nureyev said. “He wants you to anally fist him in the back room.”

Wearing matte jersey by Scott Barrie, a necklace made from a metal pipe on a grosgrain ribbon, and my Rive Gauche velvet trousers, when I was told this, I shrieked and ran toward the door.

Studio 54 was more my scene, where everyone danced with everyone. People just navigated from one end of the dance floor to the other and danced with total strangers. I would head to Studio 54 four nights a week, making sure I got to work at WWD by nine-fifteen the next morning. I was at the apex of my good-looking young self. And although I had just barely escaped the segregated Jim Crow South, I had style and attitude. I could shine with the best of them in sartorial splendor and élan.

Often one danced alone; it was all good in the neighborhood. No one judged you. When I was not alone, my three favorite people to dance with were Manolo Blahnik, John Richardson, and Loulou de la Falaise, accessories designer and muse of Yves Saint Laurent (honorable mention goes to Diana Ross, with whom I danced one night in her Saint Laurent dress, dipping her head within inches of Studio 54’s parquet floor).

Studio 54, where anything could happen. Diana Ross is wearing a velvet and taffeta evening dress, from YSL’s opulent Russian collection of 1976. I loved to dance and I loved that moment, that great fandango dip of Diana Ross.

© Getty Images/Sonia Moskowitz

Loulou had come to New York along with the rest of the Saint Laurent group. Saint Laurent had created the masterpiece of his career, the Russian collection of fall/winter 1976. Loulou could borrow anything she wanted. I first met her at her mother Maxime de la Falaise’s annual New York Christmas party. Loulou wore a giant faille silk twill, with a full sweep of skirts hinged on inset velvet hip bands, rigged with silk tassels and passementerie, and with contrasting silk petticoats underneath. And the accessories: rows and rows of rock crystal and pearls, as well as exotic Turkoman silver cuffs and gold high-heeled sandals.

Loulou was like a pied piper. She was the catalyst for Yves and his life/business partner, Pierre Bergé, to go out and have a good time. When Loulou and the YSL clan—Yves, Pierre, Betty Catroux—would hit New York, all of fashionable Manhattan took notice.

Loulou was a rag doll in my hands when we danced at Studio 54. I’d toss her high up in the air and way down to the ground. Then Sir John Richardson, in a bespoke chalk-striped lounge suit, would dance up to me and fling me as far and as firmly as he could in his arms, in a vortex of French Apache-style dancing; just the two of us, in a make-believe world. Cool as a cucumber, no language shared, no furtive obscene gestures, just good old-fashioned fun. I loved every second of it!

During the holiday season, Paloma Picasso came to town and installed herself in a suite of rooms at the Waldorf. She got a limousine, and her entourage would sardine itself into the stretch on our way to a marathon of clubs. Eventually, Loulou and I would drop Paloma and her boyfriend off, and she’d let us hang on to the limo. She didn’t want to go to the after-hours bars we went to, not dressed in YSL! We’d go to Mineshaft, Eagle’s Nest, decadent places. I was out with Loulou, cruising in Paloma’s limo, and we stopped into a dark, happening place in the Meatpacking District. No one would talk to us. Women, especially those in couture YSL silk taffeta and high gold sandals and ropes of rock-crystal beads, were not welcome in this dark cave of louche and deviant sexual pleasures.

Suddenly, a man stood on top of the bar and started urinating on revelers below him. I screamed out to Loulou, “We have to leave, my peau de soie dinner slippers Reed Evins made for me are going to be splashed by a stranger’s urine!” The men hissed at us as we left but we didn’t care. We were having too much fun.

A few months later, I received an invitation to Loulou de la Falaise and Thadée Klossowski’s wedding, which would take place in Paris. WWD let me go; what could they do, I was invited to the ball! But I had to pay my own way, in coach.

Loulou and Thadée’s marriage was all the scandal. Everyone knew that Thadée, the handsome son of Balthus, was the longtime boyfriend of Clara Saint, public relations directress of Saint Laurent Rive Gauche. That was a powerful position. The chic Clara Saint was always something of a recluse, but now she was in social Siberia. Still, she kept doing her job. She had to; her money was gone.

Yves and Pierre Bergé threw the wedding party for Thadée and Loulou, which surely complicated matters. One hundred thirty invitations went out. I got one, but Clara Saint did not.

Karl Lagerfeld also received an invitation, and asked me to go with him. Not as a date, but as a buffer. Few people could navigate the social circles of both Karl Lagerfeld and his rival Yves Saint Laurent. Paloma Picasso was able to do it, and somehow, so was I.

The wedding party was held outside, on an island in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. There was a definite awareness that Karl was there with me and not with his boyfriend, Jacques de Bascher. Yves was mad for Jacques and constantly begging Karl to give the handsome young man up. Perhaps Karl could be persuaded to exchange Jacques for a tapestry or something? Everyone knew Yves was madly in love with Jacques and hopelessly bitter. None of this was talked about, but it was known. In French they call it frisson.

Karl and I spent the night seated and snobbish. We didn’t interact with others; very grand. Yves spent the whole night high, redesigning the Zandra Rhodes ball gown Bianca Jagger was wearing. He pulled fresh ferns off the bushes and pinned them right on her ball gown. Bianca stood in quiet agony and let him do it. Yves had a huge, monstrous ego, as big as anyone’s. No one said no to him.

Everything at the ball was correct on the surface, but once the drugs came out, people were off having sex in the woods and getting into other kinds of debauchery. Karl and I wanted nothing to do with it; we left early.

The next morning I flew back to New York. It was midsummer and I was still settling into a new apartment, on East Fourteenth Street. None of my lights worked, which meant I must have forgotten to pay my electric bill before I went to Paris. It was too hot to go out, so I went to sleep in the heat.

Not until the next morning, on my way to work, did I realize this was a major blackout due to the heat, one that is still referred to as the blackout of 1977. Didn’t matter. All I cared about was my work. I walked down to the WWD office on Twelfth Street and got my next assignment.

Sauntering down Fifth Avenue in a Savile Row Huntsman bespoke suit, in December 1986, I believe.

Photograph by Arthur Elgort

In the Tuileries garden, April 1984, telling Bill Cunningham to take a picture of something that caught my eye. The coat is silk wool Perry Ellis. The hat is vintage.

Photograph by Arthur Elgort

With Bernadine Morris, of The New York Times, on the rue de Rivoli in Paris. My jacket lining is made from three full Hermès scarves! I wonder where that suit is now? In some attic?

Photograph © The Bill Cunningham Foundation. All rights not specifically granted herein are hereby reserved to the Licensor

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