The Chiffon Trenches

By André Leon Talley

Published by 4th Estate

The deadliest salvo aimed at the US Vogue editor Anna Wintour by her former creative director André Leon Talley is tucked away on page 137 of his aptly titled memoir The Chiffon Trenches.

“Generalissimo Wintour”, as he now calls her, “was never really passionate about clothes. Power was her passion…” It’s a crushing put-down for a woman whose entire world is fashion. More so, because it comes from a friend of 40 years, one who witnessed both her weddings (after her first, she thrust her bouquet into his chest, saying: “Here, take care of this”) and cradled the weeping Wintour in his arms at her mother’s funeral.

Other barbed volleys accuse the corporate culture at Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue, of being “brutal”, “cruel” and “special in its ability to spit people out”. Wintour is said to be ageist, fattist and ruthless, leaving 70-year-old Talley with “huge emotional and psychological scars”. Simple human kindness? “No, she is not capable,” he writes. Wintour’s crime was to ghost him, ostensibly unable to tell Talley face to face that as an elderly man in the age of the influencer, he was no longer relevant. This memoir is his revenge.

Leaked excerpts, including revelations about Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent and Naomi Campbell, have left fashion followers gasping, desperate for the book’s release. What awaits is a tell-all in which it is difficult to discern who the biggest diva is — the author included. Because Talley has penned what no other insider has dared: an exposé of the cut-throat world of fashion and a direct attack on its most powerful woman. Given the huge success of The Devil Wears Prada, Hollywood has come knocking for more, with Hulu and Amazon rumoured to be interested in a TV series; Talley hopes he’ll be played by Will Smith.

Indeed, how this 6ft 6in giant of a man fought his way out of North Carolina and into the hallowed fashion houses of Paris is as captivating as his war with Wintour. Talley’s memoir charts a damaged childhood in the Deep South, where he dreamt of living the life he saw on the pages of Vogue magazine in his local library. It was a world, he believed, “where bad things never happen”. Distanced from his working parents and raised by a grandmother who hugged him only twice, Talley was further scarred by sexual abuse from a neighbour.

An impressive intellect rescued him, leading to a full scholarship at Brown University, where he learnt French and finessed his unorthodox style for his next adventure: New York’s fashion scene in the 1970s. “My great depth of knowledge is the number one skill I possess and has carried me throughout my career to this day,” he writes.

Talley’s towering sartorial presence also helped: he arrived in Manhattan with two pairs of velvet Rive Gauche trousers, two silk shirts and a pair of black silk smoking shoes. An enchanted Diana Vreeland, fashion curator and former Vogue editor, introduced him to Andy Warhol, and his journalistic career at Interview magazine took off.

This era produces the memoir’s most colourful chapters, as Talley parties with Halston, Paloma Picasso, Bianca Jagger and their like. He frequents S&M dens with Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev and one night runs out of a club in the Meatpacking District screeching the book’s best line: “We have to leave, my peau de soie dinner slippers Reed Evans made for me are going to be splashed by a stranger’s urine!”

This was a city where “everyone was high on coke and cock”, but Talley’s childhood abuse left him “confused and bewildered” about sex. He preferred “massive” bouts of high-end retail therapy and dancing four times a week at Studio 54, where in 1976 he did the fandango dip with Diana Ross. When the job of bureau chief of Women’s Wear Daily in Paris beckoned, he became best friends with Lagerfeld, who would go on to reinvent Chanel.

They talked daily on the phone about literature, art and their shared infatuation with luxury — Talley once blew $30,000 on a three-week stay at the Ritz. Theirs was a friendship that survived his New York years at Vogue, until one day in 2013 he was ostracised for asking for Lagerfeld’s help with a retrospective for a photographer who had recently died. Talley dared to ask Karl “for money to support another artist. The guillotine dropped.” Chanel’s PR apparatchiks barred him from the runway shows, struck him off their Christmas gift list and Lagerfeld never spoke to Talley again.

Unfriended by one of Vogue’s biggest advertisers, is it any coincidence that the same year saw him step down as the magazine’s editor-at-large, as Wintour began to cut her ties with him too?

His writing style may be as pompous as his reputation and as camp as his collection of designer kaftans, but such stories about the fashion greats make for perfect lockdown gossip. Yves Saint Laurent had “a monstrous ego” and coveted Lagerfeld’s boyfriend Jacques de Bascher; he once asked Talley whether Karl “would be persuaded to exchange Jacques for a tapestry?” Naomi Campbell? He claims in the book that last year on their trip to Nigeria she left him “about to pass out” in the sun, refusing his request to board their private plane because she needed to film her “departure”. Lagerfeld? He’d act “like a bloodsucking vampire”, demanding that expensive gifts be returned to him.

Talley’s tragedy is that he “always wanted love” in a world of transactional relationships, and ultimately turned to food for comfort. In his 2017 documentary The Gospel According to André, he cuts a lonely figure in his home in White Plains, New York, and towards the end of this book, when Wintour turns her back on him at a party, Talley’s devastation is palpable.

The reader is left to contemplate who the victors are in this sorry tale.

At 70, Wintour is fighting to retain her power in a dying magazine world. Her unedifying treatment of Talley that he references in the book has only compounded her Devil Wears Prada persona. Even her former Condé Nast stablemate, the ex-Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, has broken ranks to say Wintour would sometimes treat him “as if she had just handed over her keys to an unknown parking valet”. In a recent post on Instagram, American couture designer Ralph Rucci promised more revelations: “I will write about what I had to contend with concerning this very, very meaningless person.” The lid has been lifted.

Meanwhile Talley has emerged from the chiffon trenches, morbidly obese, but clutching a potential bestselling memoir, with TV studios interested in filming his extraordinary life.

For Wintour, the battle may have only just begun.