André Leon Talley

Durham, North Carolina, under Jim Crow is where André Leon Talley learned what he later called elegance, mostly from the grandmother who raised him and cleaned dormitories at Duke University. He took a degree in French literature at North Carolina Central University and a master's at Brown, writing on Baudelaire, then apprenticed without pay to Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute in 1974. Andy Warhol's Interview came next, followed by a stint as Paris bureau chief of Women's Wear Daily. At Vogue he was fashion news director, then creative director from 1988, the first Black man in that job, then editor-at-large until 2013. The Chiffon Trenches, from 2020, is the last and least guarded of his memoirs: it settles accounts with Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld, sets out the racism he met inside the industry, and is candid about his weight, his loneliness and his money. He died on 18 January 2022, aged 73.