The Chiffon Trenches

by André Leon Talley

  It just so happened that my friendship with Karl also provided me with inside news and scoops on Paris and the fashion world from one of the most important sources. And he gave me great quotes: “What is the worst is a fashion designer who talks all the time of his or her creativity, what they are, how they evolve. Just do it and shut up.” John Fairchild loved that.

  —

  Betty Catroux took care of me that first year in Paris. Although I wasn’t going to church regularly at that point, I still began my mornings with prayer, and then waited for the phone to ring and connect me to the voice, that deep voice, much like a French Lauren Bacall. “TAAAAAAA-LE! How is my TAAAAAAAA-LE doing today?” She rang every single morning without fail, always on time, the same time. And then in my little duplex room, I would climb the small stairs to the bath and begin my day. Room service was ordered: two hot French croissants with preserves and a big pot of delicious hot coffee with cream.

  Well into the third month of our morning wake-up call at the Hôtel Lenox, Betty must have gotten to know my moods well. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, like the nurturing mother of two daughters, Maxime and Daphne, she is.

  “Nothing’s wrong!”

  “I can tell by your voice that something indeed is wrong, so tell me!”

  For three months, I had kept it bottled up; I was afraid to voice this to anyone. I finally told Betty: I was tired of the Continental-style breakfast at the Hôtel Lenox. They only served croissants, butter, and preserves. I yearned for a good hot breakfast; I was homesick and wanted scrambled eggs, bacon, and jam with biscuits and butter.

  “TAAAAAA-LE! You’ve simply got to ask for this and they will make it. Are you serious? Is that all?”

  I had never been away from home, in a hotel, and did not yet realize the polite French waiters would serve me a full breakfast if I asked for it! It was silly, a bit of culture shock. From then on, I had whatever I wanted for breakfast.

  I never felt like an outsider in Paris, but there were definitely those who saw me as such. And behind my back, they were talking about it. I had confidence, I knew what I was doing, I knew when I talked to someone I had the background to talk to them. I felt inside the circle, the inner sanctum of high fashion. When most people avoided me in Paris socially (they accepted me professionally because of my job at WWD), Betty Catroux loved me and accepted me for who I was, not for what I did. That was rare in fashion circles.

  Betty had no personal agenda. She allowed me to know Yves Saint Laurent, intimately. Yves, who liked to have fun with Betty, would escape from the overbearing Pierre Bergé and land in the zone of cool, with his gal pal and “twin.”

  One morning she called, as usual, and told me she had arranged for us to meet up at Yves’s apartment, and then we’d move on to the gay nightclub Club Sept, just the three of us, come Saturday evening. Buoyed by the great reviews I’d given him in WWD, Yves conspired with Betty to see me, without Pierre Bergé, the guardian of the gate at the house of Saint Laurent, who wanted to control all aspects of his former lover’s life.

  Pierre had, at times, a turbulent relationship with Yves. They lived together, and then apart, in separate bachelor apartments. Yet they continued to work together for their joint empire.

  I was so excited. What would we do? What would I wear?

  “What are you going to wear?” I asked Betty. How silly of me. It was of course going to be something black, borrowed from the archives of Yves Saint Laurent. Which gave me an idea: I asked Betty to please borrow from YSL this marvelous gold quilted brocade jacket, with large sleeves trimmed in black mink, from the Opium autumn/winter collection. I insisted she ask that the original couture sample be sent to her home for me to wear that night. She thought it a bad idea but agreed to ask for it.

  At around ten P.M. on Saturday evening, we met in the ground-level all-white library of Yves’s apartment. There was Yves, and on the white sofa was the gold coat. Betty said to Yves, “André dreamed of wearing the jacket!” I tried it on, and of course it didn’t fit; I was way too tall, even as skinny as I was. It was made for a woman’s shoulders. The sleeves stopped about seven inches above my wrists. I looked ridiculous. Betty tried it on and it was stunning, but she already had her own black YSL pantsuit. The jacket would go unworn.

  Pierre Bergé was always concerned that Yves would go off the rails, drinking and partying too much. And did we that night? Yes. Before even leaving Yves’s apartment, we three had consumed a bottle each of the best Russian vodka, drinking it straight with no ice, from small shot glasses. Betty and I saw the side of Yves that was supposed to be hidden from view. Wicked, witty, wild, amusing, and fun. He was a happy boy, smiling with Betty, the two of them like the brother and sister in Jean Cocteau’s Les enfants terribles. We spoke in French about the Broadway collection and my review of it. The collection had been a resounding success, which may be why he was in such a good mood.

  As we spoke, there was suddenly smoke rising up, like smoke signals. The ash from one of Yves’s cigarettes had fallen into the cushions of the sofa! Yves was a chain-smoker; he is said to have smoked more than one hundred cigarettes a day. We extinguished the smoke with water from an ice bucket, narrowly avoiding disaster. After we put out the fire, we hid the dark circle of cigarette singe by turning the cushion over to the clean side. Pierre would be none the wiser! We laughed and giggled like children being naughty in the schoolyard.

  You could only imagine how it would have seemed to John Fairchild, in New York, were Pierre to have reported to him that I helped send Yves’s legendary, art-filled, antique-decorated (museum-quality antiques!) apartment up in flames. I am sure it would have been cause for me to be sent back to New York in disgrace, fired, humiliated, scandalized.

  Off we went to Club Sept, making a fabulous entrance into the downstairs dance area. We were treated like VIPs, positioned to gaze over the dance floor from a small bar at the back. There we stood for about two hours, never uttering one word, gazing in a vodka-fueled fog at the gay French and international set dancing.

  —

  Karl Lagerfeld and Valentino were both holding fragrance launch parties on the same spring night in Paris in 1978. Karl’s was at his apartment, so I went to his place first for a quick appearance. I couldn’t not attend, but I had to go to Valentino as well, to cover the party for WWD. The Rothschilds, the Brandolinis, everyone would be there.

  Paloma Picasso was at Karl’s, as they were great friends; in fact, besides myself, she was one of the only people who could be close with both Karl and Yves. Heir to the great fortune of her father, Paloma was a muse to both designers. She bought her forties-era Bakelite jewelry and antique silk dresses and furs at London’s Portobello Road and the Paris Flea Market. Yves found inspiration in her style, and created an entire haute couture collection in spring 1971, long before I arrived on the scene.

  When I stepped inside Karl’s apartment, Paloma came up and took my arm. Then she doubled around to collect Karl, led us into the guest suite bathroom, and shut the door.

  This being Karl Lagerfeld’s bathroom, we were not in any way cramped. There was a small set of stairs that Karl and I sat back on, to prepare for what seemed to be big news.

  “We’re getting married!” she squealed. “And, Karl, I want you to do the wedding dress.” We jumped up to congratulate her. Her fiancé, playwright Rafael Lopez-Sanchez, and his best friend from Buenos Aires, Javier Arroyuelo, came in, and we immediately took to planning what was sure to be a momentous affair.

  Of course I would be covering the wedding and everything leading up to it for WWD. But asking Karl to design the dress was a bold move; to keep the peace, it was decided that Karl would design the evening dress and Yves would do the day dress. That level of diplomacy is exactly what it took to straddle the ice-cold pillars of fashion.

  In all the commotion, I lost track of time. If I didn’t get to the Valentino fragrance launch party, there would be no story in WWD. The problem: Valentino’s party was at Max
im’s, and a black-tie affair. I needed to go home, way across town in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, then get dressed, then come back to the Right Bank for the party at Maxim’s. It was already so late.

  “It’s going to be a nightmare to go through that traffic to get home!” I exclaimed.

  Paloma was gracious about giving up the floor to my dilemma.

  “Oh please, I can find something for you to wear,” Karl said.

  He went into his closet and took out a custom-made black herringbone cashmere dressing gown, with a long sash trimmed in pale salmon pink, and a black belt with fringe in cherry red. Very Oscar Wilde. I put on one of Karl’s white shirts, cufflinks, a black tie, and my own gray trousers. It was stunning but daring. I hesitated.

  “Are you sure about this, Karl?” I asked. I was already a tall black man; did I want to meet all the great ladies of Paris at a black-tie Valentino party in a robe?

  “It looks great on you, André,” Karl said.

  “André, it looks great on you,” Paloma eagerly parroted.

  It was settled. If Karl Lagerfeld said I was properly dressed, then I was properly dressed. I wore the dressing gown.

  The A-list hoi polloi of Paris gasped when I entered Maxim’s. It’s not like I showed up in boxer shorts. The dressing gown was from Hilditch & Key and likely cost thousands of dollars. They wanted to be scandalized; they were desperate for something to wag their tongues about. Word got back to me that Valentino himself found it amusing. But still, breaking the rules of black tie was not something people did back then.

  Fingers dialed John Fairchild: How could your reporter arrive at Maxim’s not wearing conventional black tie? To me, it was a minor infraction.

  The day after, Betty Catroux called to let me know my dressing gown and I were the talk of the town.

  “I’m already well aware of it!” I said.

  I didn’t realize it then, but Betty Catroux fought with her swell friends on my behalf.

  Through her intervention, the backlash about my wardrobe evaporated. The beau monde of Paris café society and high society would just have to accept this black American string bean.

  For his part, Karl found the whole thing amusing. The great Anna Piaggi later wrote about my scandal in her Italian Vogue column, with an illustration in color by Karl Lagerfeld.

  —

  Paloma was married in a civil ceremony at the mayor’s office, accompanied by close friends and family. Karl and I attended together. Yves was there with his group, and Anna Piaggi was also there. For the day, Paloma wore custom-made clothes from YSL’s Broadway collection: a white jacket, black skirt, and red blouse, and a red feather hat made by Yves. She looked more like Marlene Dietrich than a bride.

  For night, Karl dressed Paloma in a cherry-red evening dress shaped like two hearts, in which she was photographed by all the magazines. He hosted a beautiful eighteenth-century-inspired dinner at his house.

  Valentino gave me a linen suit to wear by day, and for night, I had a lapeled smoking jacket and pant custom-made at Christian Dior on avenue Montaigne, where I paid for it at a discount, on a layaway plan. It was my first custom-made smoking. I also wore bowed dinner slippers, bespoke, by Manolo Blahnik.

  Everyone who was anyone in Paris was at Paloma’s wedding dinner. It was quite literally one of the only occasions that could possibly place Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent in the same room at the same time. It was a table of about fifty people, including Yves and Pierre; Fred Hughes, in from New York (Andy was not there); choreographer Serge Lifar; and Anna Piaggi, who was Karl’s confidante in everything and, for some time, his muse.

  Anna Piaggi worked as a special fashion editor for Italian Vogue and was considered “the dean of Italian fashion.” The first black model to appear on any Vogue cover was put there by Anna Piaggi, in 1971 (it was Kenzo’s muse, Carol La Brie). Anna Piaggi had a museum-like, curatorial approach to her fashion collection; “I must say it is more economical to dress from the antique auction houses than Paris couturiers. I have dresses that should be in museums that only cost me $50,” she told me for WWD. She’d do things like mix a McDonald’s apron with a Lanvin gown from the 1920s. Very eccentric, sort of a Marchesa Casati kind of figure. Karl illustrated an entire book of his personal drawings of Anna Piaggi in her vintage couture wardrobe.

  Once, she arrived at Le Palace, the gay disco, with a whole basket of dead pigeons on her head. In an attempt to upstage Karl, she’d gone to Les Halles district and ordered an entire basket of them. Pigeon was a staple of French restaurants. By midnight the pigeons began to stink! I was seated next to her and constantly had to turn my head in the opposite direction to come up for air. Finally I abandoned her and rushed to the dance floor.

  With Anna around, Karl felt more daring and would dress more outrageously. He wore a proper smoking to the wedding, along with musketeer-style leather boots that came up, then curled back, above the thigh. The reaction was one of shock.

  Anna Piaggi would not be outdone: She wore an enormous 1919 silver lamé ball gown. And on her head: a nickel-plated helmet from some operatic performance, spiked with white bird-of-paradise feathers.

  As she got up to squeeze between the huge square tables, she walked past a fireplace with a Louis XV candelabra lit with waxed candles. In just an instant, her plumes caught on fire.

  Everyone gasped, “You’re on fire! You’re on fire!” But Anna Piaggi just kept excusing herself, walking sideways as she attempted to pass by in her huge gown.

  Attempts to help her were mistaken by Anna for common chivalry and politely declined.

  When she finally realized she was in fact a walking fire, she kept her sangfroid and said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Would you put it out?”

  Someone rose up and threw water on the singed feathers. Anna thanked him with a bemused smile and sailed forward to the powder room.

  She gave me a great quote for WWD: “It’s happened before, there’s nothing to do.”

  After the party, we went to Le Palace. Yves came along, as did Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. Tina Chow came in a first-rate, museum-quality Schiaparelli bugle-beaded dinner suit, with a knee-length skirt. As we all danced together, Manolo Blahnik gathered Tina, this neat vision of chic, in his arms and flung her around the loge balcony. He put her down and picked me up next, like an able champion wrestler.

  “Manolo, put me down!” I pleaded under the din of loud, thumping disco music.

  “My Dior suit isn’t paid for yet! Put me down!”

  We were all on top of the world at this wedding. We felt free and there weren’t even any drugs—well, at least not with any of my close friends. Maybe there was too much fine champagne.

  My favorite part of the night: Paloma handed me her evening bag to hold while she was dancing. As small as it seems, it was a great honor. I put it in the pocket of my smoking jacket and kept it safe while she danced all night.

  As I lay in bed later, still pulsing from the music, I thought about Karl’s thigh-high boots. He had reinterpreted a style from the eighteenth-century courts of France and made it bold and modern.

  There was so much freedom in those boots, enough to make me realize I still felt restricted, restrained by my upbringing. People in North Carolina were not outside-the-box thinkers; they were straight, rigid, and judgmental. And now here I was, in Paris, discovering these fascinating people, and yes, I felt liberated in certain ways, but I did not feel totally free.

  Up until then I had mostly worn suits to work, beautifully made suits, yes, but always the comportment of rigid professionalism. I was aware I was the only black person sitting on the front row in Paris at the haute couture. There was a corresponding pressure that I had to behave a certain way. I felt a responsibility, as a black man, not to f——k up.

  The anxiety I felt about Karl’s dressing me like Oscar Wilde that night in his dressing gown morphed into a feeling of exhilaration. I had trusted Karl implicitly, and I still had my job. My style evolved that moment, influenced by
Anna Piaggi and Karl. I depended on sartorial boldness to camouflage my interior vortex of pain, insecurity, and doubt. I realized then that I never wanted to look like anyone else.

  —

  So many of my friends were happily in love, and yet my own absence of love did not weigh heavily on my mind. My fondest memory of romance came about shortly after Paloma’s wedding. It was with Paul Mathias, a reporter for Paris Match, whom I had never heard of. One spring Saturday, I met him at a formal lunch given by São Schlumberger.

  Later that night, I mentioned his name while speaking on the phone to Andy Warhol. Andy took this as a signal to play matchmaker. A date was arranged, for me to go to Mathias’s bachelor apartment in a fashionable arrondissement. I thought this could be the moment for a real romantic coupling. He was handsome, erudite, witty, and well dressed. I had been told he was a brilliant man, friends with Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy. When he had first immigrated to Paris from Budapest, he had made his living by singing in nightclubs, with his beautiful bass voice.

  Mathias’s apartment was simple, not overly decorated like the homes of all the other social lions, but it had comfort. Before our dinner date, Andy forewarned me: I must exalt his very expansive collection of Old Master drawings. He was proud of his Poussins and had them framed and mounted on his beautiful walls.

  We talked for a while, Paul sharing his knowledge of Old Masters. He must have liked me, because he was gentle, attentive, and careful. He lit a joint and built up to a sexual moment, which, quite frankly, failed completely. As we both climbed into his beautiful nineteenth-century brass bed and slipped under the sheets, I had no clue as to how to proceed. Clearly my childhood nightmares had rendered me inept with my sexuality.