The Chiffon Trenches

by André Leon Talley

  Grace wasn’t always clear about what she was trying to get across, but she was democratic and inclusive of everyone. Absolutely everyone. Once I was hired, she did not exclude me from any of the fashion meetings, despite my low positioning on the masthead. In many ways, she was a good balance to a cast of eccentric creatives. Very organized and totally aware of the times, but not in an emotional way. It was important to her that Vogue represented the best in the industry. She loved Geoffrey Beene and had a fondness for Emanuel Ungaro, but she also knew that Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld were the giants.

  Meetings with Grace would go on for hours. We’d see a fashion show on Friday night, then come into the office on Saturday to labor over the light boxes: “Did Bill Blass have a good collection? Are we sure? Should we address this?” Hours.

  In Paris, it was the same tedium, everyone sitting around a table, painstakingly going over every little decision. At that point, Vogue was sending twenty-two people to Europe four times a year for the shows in Milan and Paris. Anna and I would share a car and go as a team; sometimes Vera Wang would be with us as well (she worked for Vogue at the time). For the big moneymaker shows, Anna would sit on the front row with Grace and Polly Mellen. I would usually sit in the second row, which made it easier to comport myself in the way Grace expected; there’s no reason to clap profusely when you’re in the second row. The more up-and-coming designers would show on the weekends, and I went to as many of them as possible, even if the higher-ups at Vogue weren’t interested in attending.

  There was a push-and-pull between Grace and Anna; they each had their own idea of what Vogue should be. Anna’s position as creative director was vague enough to give her both total control of the magazine and zero control, depending on whom you asked.

  It was Anna who sent me down to meet with Andy Warhol and commission a drawing of Diana Vreeland for Vogue. Nineteen eighty-four’s fashion exhibition at the Costume Institute was titled Man and the Horse, and Vogue wanted to commemorate Vreeland with an on-theme portrait.

  Andy had the idea to take Jacques-Louis David’s painting Napoleon Crossing the Alps and impose Diana Vreeland’s head onto the image. Anna loved it but didn’t trust Andy to get the work done on time. She sent me, as well as her second assistant, Isabella Blow, down to the Factory every day to check on the silk-screening. I was supposed to just be writing a story about the process, but Anna insisted I take control of the situation. Every day, we would take Polaroids to show Anna the progress being made.

  We were literally watching paint dry! Finally I imbued Isabella with the power to watch the painting process by herself. It really was just busy work, which was just right for Isabella. She wore opera gloves while she typed, not an ideal fashion choice for a second assistant, but Isabella Blow’s style was too sophisticated to give her such critiques.

  —

  In 1984, Anna Wintour married psychiatrist Dr. David Shaffer.

  She got married in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. I was invited, but I did not know anything else about the ceremony. I wore my best gray glen plaid bespoke Dior suit and left straight from the office, arriving at Anna’s Sullivan Street home at twelve-thirty P.M.

  Inside, there was a luncheon table for about forty people. I looked for Mr.

  Liberman, and for Grace Mirabella, but did not see either. The only other person from Vogue was Anna’s first assistant, Laurie Schechter. Not even Polly Mellen was in attendance. The banquet table was filled with family and, strangely, Anna’s ex-boyfriends. They all came over from England for her wedding. I guess it was some kind of English custom.

  Anna wore a pale Devonshire-cream silk Chanel dress from the boutique to be married in. After the ceremony, she changed to her honeymoon dress: a navy and white striped silk ankle-length, button-front dress, from the Chanel Paris boutique. When she reemerged, she had to walk down the stairs of her apartment, back into the party.

  Everyone crowded around the bottom of the staircase, thinking she was going to follow tradition and throw her bouquet. There were no bridesmaids; her only attendant was her friend Joan Juliet Buck, whose close friendship with Karl was integral to procuring the wedding frocks.

  Anna ignored the eager crowd, walked down the steps, came directly to me, and thrust the bouquet into my chest. “Here, take care of this.”

  I got back to the office around four-thirty (of course I had to go back to the office) and walked straight to Grace Mirabella’s office. I had a feeling she’d be waiting for me and I was right. Mr. Liberman was there as well.

  “Well?” Grace asked. “How was it?”

  “She thrust the bouquet in my chest!”

  —

  Two years after the wedding, Anna left American Vogue to be editor in chief at British Vogue and asked me to come with her, as creative director.

  I said yes at first, and announced my exit from American Vogue. Then I hesitated. I had no illusions about Anna’s ambitions, though she never discussed her career strategies with me. However, it was my grandmother who gave me pause; she was now getting to an advanced age and living by herself. If something happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to get home to Durham fast enough from London.

  Also, I suppose I was afraid to go to London. WWD had planned everything for me when they sent me to Paris; all I had to do was pack my belongings and get on a plane.

  Anna wasn’t offering me a furnished fashionable apartment suite; the British Vogue budget would not allow this.

  Instead of my going to London, Alex Liberman graciously installed me at Vanity Fair as style editor, under the visionary editor Tina Brown. Surely Anna Wintour had something to do with the ease of this transition.

  Vanity Fair gave me a level of freedom that didn’t exist for me at Vogue. For the first time, I was generating my own concepts. Plus I enjoyed working with Tina Brown but still got to spend some time with Anna Wintour. Whenever I would go to London on assignment, to work with Lord Snowdon, I could stop by Anna’s offices, and she would tell people to let me use their desks, so I would have a place to sit for a day or two. I mean important people, people like creative director Patrick Kinmonth! She would show me layouts and we would review designs, as though we still worked together. Our devotion to our work continued to keep us aligned.

  In 1987, Andy Warhol died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-eight. A grand funeral mass was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, and all of New York was there.

  The entire church was fully packed for the somber affair. I was seated next to Isabella Blow, who wore a beautiful black Bill Blass couture suit (that she’d paid for) and a proper hat. We sat in the same pew with Dominick Dunne. During the funeral, I thought about the career trajectory Andy had launched me on. He was a wonderful boss, and a loyal friend to me up until the end. The thing about Andy is that he was truly inclusive.

  Diversity was never an issue; he wanted you to be special. I was lucky to have that kind of acceptance in the early stages of my career. He was one of the great twentieth-century artists, and his legacy will continue to astonish.

  Soon after the funeral, Anna came back to New York, as editor in chief of House & Garden. Her first task was to rename the magazine HG. Her second was to name me creative director. She didn’t tell me how or why she made the move, but she didn’t have to. I wasn’t stupid; it was clear where all this was going. It was a well-known secret that Anna was working her way up to Grace Mirabella’s job.

  Anna’s move to HG was bold, and garnered a lot of attention, not all of which was positive. However, we had a lot of fun at HG. We would both get to the office by seven-thirty A.M., and often our dark Big Apple Car sedans, provided by Condé Nast, ended up parallel on Madison Avenue. We would roll down our windows and wave to each other as we crisscrossed through early morning traffic heading uptown.

  Anna moved fast; she made decisions quickly and she did not change her mind. In the beginning, the first hour of every day at HG was spent emptying the art department of a
ll the existing portfolios that had been shot and never used. We were reinventing the brand of interior decoration and none of these dusty old photos needed to take up precious space.

  HG subscribers, largely situated on the Upper East Side, were all awhirl, canceling subscriptions. Anna was thinking outside the box, and Mr. Newhouse supported and trusted her implicitly. For the September issue, Anna had Lord Snowdon take portraits of the great interior decorators of America in their own homes. He photographed Sister Parish for the cover, Mark Hampton, all the great interior designers. And for each one, he covered all their furnishings in dust sheets, so you couldn’t see their personal interior style. That was odd, but it was a great way to shoot these grand people, who all had strong personalities.

  Hyatt Bass, the daughter of Sid and Anne Bass, interned for me at HG. Sid Bass was a famous Texas billionaire and Anne Bass one of the top customers of Parisian couture, especially Valentino. I could always use an assistant, so I said okay. Hyatt was a wonderful intern, nice and quiet as a church mouse in response to my constantly barking instructions to her at the end of my office, near the door, where her desk was backed up against a wall. At the end of the summer, we went for a celebratory lunch with her mother at La Grenouille. Anne Bass came in a Christian Lacroix jacket. When I sat down, she looked at me and said, “You’re a good man, André. You know, I’ve had you checked out.”

  “I beg your pardon, what do you mean?”

  “I had you investigated, to make sure you’re legit. I couldn’t have my daughter working for just anyone.”

  I guess she wanted to see if I was a former felon, had a drug charge or something.

  She was a mother and rightfully wary. I took no offense. After that we became good friends, meeting each season at the couture collections in Paris.

  At HG, I started doing house sittings. We did traditional houses, grand homes in Europe, and even Christian Lacroix’s couture house. It was Anne Bass who arranged for me to photograph Badminton House, a grand seventeenth-century English estate with three hundred rooms. It was the family home of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort. I was there for three days photographing that grand pile.

  Anna Wintour sent me to Regensburg to photograph Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis for HG, in the royal palace of Thurn und Taxis. Karl had told me about this German princess, who had married Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, one of the richest men in Europe. She came to Paris and made quite a splash, ordering dozens of Chanel suits and a bunch of Lacroix; she had acres and acres of couture clothes.

  When she first came to Paris, Princess Gloria was very conservative, all strands of pearls, cashmere twinsets, and tweed skirts. By the time I met her for HG, she had transformed herself into an extravagant image of couture punk. She had spiked hair and played in a band. She had this great tiara, with a large blue sapphire in the middle, that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. It was part of the Thurn und Taxis family jewels.

  I arrived at the palace and it was overwhelming—the courtyard, the whole thing was just bigger than life, bigger than Buckingham Palace, even. I was taken to a reception room, where the photographer Max Vadukul and I waited a very long time for the princess to come down. While she was having her hair and makeup done, we scouted the palace, so we’d know where to photograph. In one of the state bedrooms, we found an Empire bed shaped like swans. Princess Gloria came down in the midafternoon, sat on the bed, and strummed her guitar. The pictures ran and we became close friends.

  The following year, Princess Gloria’s husband died, leaving her with a surprise: untold millions in debt. She found a great lawyer in New York and had a big sale of vintage furniture and antique cars from the palace. Through her business savvy, she saved the family fortune.

  HG was a dream. However, everyone knew HG was just a trial run. It only lasted for nine months, and then, finally, Anna Wintour got the job she’d been gunning for.

  —

  Just like with Diana Vreeland, Grace Mirabella was the last to realize she had been replaced. WNBC-TV’s Live at Five broke the news to her.

  Anna Wintour took over as editor in chief of Vogue.

  I was named creative director. There was no higher accolade she could give me, as the masthead portrayed. Anna Wintour made me the highest-ranking black man in the history of fashion journalism. (If the importance of this is lost on you, please remember again that this was 1988, and I was not superseded in that ranking until Edward Enninful’s momentous rise as editor in chief of British Vogue, thirty years later.) Vogue was an institution. I became, for a moment, the most important male in fashion journalism. As an African American man born in the ugly and racist Jim Crow South, I understood how monumental this was. I was the first.

  What exactly a creative director does was never explained to me. In the world of fashion, things go unspoken. Anna Wintour saw something in me that others did not see, the same way the great Delphic oracle Diana Vreeland did. I never quite understood it. As I saw it, I was meant to be by Anna Wintour at all times and encourage her visions.

  My new office was larger, situated near Anna’s but not adjacent. I decorated it with Aubusson rugs woven in Portugal (which Mr. Liberman loved because they were reminiscent of old Russian interiors).

  There was no “transition period.” Once Anna’s reign was announced, it was simply bullet speed and lighting bolts ahead. There was no time to celebrate; we had a magazine to put out. We all worked with such energy, presenting dynamic, youthful ideas.

  Polly Mellen was kept on as fashion director, despite the histrionics she engaged in when Grace Mirabella was tossed out. Histrionics were her thing! “The stage lost its greatest actress when Polly Mellen turned to fashion,” Diana Vreeland said.

  Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, one of the greatest fashion editors who ever lived, formerly of French Elle, also came on as a fashion director. She styled—invented— Anna’s first Vogue cover. It was a Lacroix couture jacket worn with frayed and well-worn blue jeans worn by a young model named Michaela Bercu. Never had jeans appeared on the cover of Vogue in its history. The jacket front was implanted with a giant gold cross, blazing with faux stones, something a young couture client might order at the time.

  Grace Coddington was also hired, also as a fashion director. A longtime fashion director for British Vogue, Grace had fled for New York during Anna’s leadership over that magazine and taken on a lucrative job at Calvin Klein. She missed the magazine trade, however, and the creative freedom of working with different designers. Anna was happy to have her come to American Vogue. Grace Coddington is a genius, truly illuminating and creative.

  Each of these women had a strong, independent personality. By naming all three fashion directors, Anna gave each equal billing on the masthead, and each could do her own thing. It was a brilliant move, politically. The equality of their roles also reflected the fact that at Anna Wintour’s Vogue, there was no hierarchy. There was Anna Wintour, and there was everyone else.

  To Anna Wintour, a good meeting was over in eight minutes. If a meeting went beyond fifteen minutes, it meant something was seriously wrong. If she relied on your taste and your thought process, there was no need for a conversation with an editor to last more than a few minutes.

  The first meeting I ever had with her outside the office was at Bice, where we went for lunch. I wore my favorite custom-made double-breasted navy blue suit, with a pink shirt. Before the first course came out, she got up and said, “Okay, let’s go back to the office.” As I passed the maître d’ on the way out, his “c’est la vie” expression assured me they had already gotten used to Ms. Wintour’s “lunch meetings” and had likely not set the grill to whatever she had ordered. Anna didn’t want to waste time sitting around thinking about something; she wanted her editors to get out and do it.

  One of my first big assignments was Madonna’s first Vogue cover, shot in 1989. I was in Paris covering the collections and had to fly out to Los Angeles with a bag of clothes for the shoot. Madonna’s Hollywood pad was spaciou
s, with a minimalist décor.

  She smiled warmly when she introduced herself and said, “Hi, I’m Madonna, you want a blow job?”

  “No thanks,” I replied. I am sure she was joking and just breaking the ice, as we had never met before. I was flattered and continued to unpack my large black cases from Paris.

  One was expected to behave a certain way when representing Vogue. I played it cool and I behaved in an aloof, distant, somewhat disdainful manner, the way people usually conduct themselves on the front row. It’s rare that you see a major editor emote. Polly Mellen constantly emoted and verbalized little utterances. She was unique. I can count on my fingers the number of times I saw Anna Wintour raise her hands and clap them above her head, as if to register to the world, This is a masterpiece. She did it once for Alexander McQueen’s show inspired by They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with Jane Fonda, based entirely on the dramatic scenes of marathon dance competitions during the Depression era in the United States.

  People often stood at Saint Laurent collections to cheer him like he was a sports hero. His front was loyal. Everyone who was a friend of the house stood. Vogue editors and WWD editors simply sat there, clapping yet sphinxlike. No one dared shout, “Bravo, bravo!”

  People never cried; okay, I did cry once on the front row of a runway, but only the once! Karl opened Chloé’s fall/winter 1978 show with Pat Cleveland and Carol La Brie, two extraordinary African American models. They were standing behind a gray grille, like they were in a prison. Or was it a giant birdcage? It was magical. I always made it a habit to show my admiration and sincere emotion when I felt something was truly worthy.

  Editors take on the role they are expected to from the top; one just didn’t clap out of control at an opening when you represented Vogue. But oftentimes I just couldn’t help myself. That was part of my being; my very life was sustained by the glamour, the guts, and the glory of front-row reporting at a great fashion show. It was my professional hallelujah.