After the success of Galliano’s São Schlumberger show, it started becoming clear I’d hit a glass ceiling at Vogue. It was Anna Wintour who had officially “saved” John Galliano, but I was the one on the ground, keeping the seams straight, so to speak. I had done this great job but wasn’t being treated properly or recognized for my efforts. And I put up with that, until I did not.
Anna Wintour, in all her imperial hauteur and froideur, had put me in a box and apparently decided there was no bigger job in the works for me. I couldn’t, for example, be a consultant to the Costume Institute at the Met, when other talented editors became curators for shows. Anna Wintour didn’t see me in the role of curator. That hurt. After all, I had learned from the best teacher, Diana Vreeland.
There was no big falling-out with Anna, no big blowup. I just walked into her office in New York one day, and when I walked out I slammed the door and left. There was no back-and-forth, no argument. Anna Wintour doesn’t argue. I don’t remember the specifics of what I said to her or what it was that pushed me to this point. I just remember that I was fed up.
When I got home, I booked a flight back to Paris and did not return any calls from Vogue. Karl Lagerfeld did his best to talk some sense into me. “You better get back in her good graces,” he said.
I didn’t want to hear it. I was done with New York, I was done with Paris, and I was done with the politics of fashion. All I knew for sure was that I needed to clear my head.
My grandmother had been dead five years and I hadn’t had a chance to slow down and properly grieve since. I decided to move down to the furnished house I had bought for her in Durham and put some space between me and Vogue’s far reach.
A couple months went by in Durham, including Thanksgiving and Christmas. I was in my house alone, surrounded by my grandmother’s belongings. To stem the loneliness, I ate. Both holidays I had catered by Dillard’s BBQ, a local soul food restaurant, enough for a table full of people. A pan of mac and cheese, a pan of turkey with the dressing, stuffing, candied yams, and a basket of homemade biscuits. And for dessert, a lemon cake and a chocolate cake. No vegetables, no fruit, and no guests were invited. In one night I ate almost half of it, then I woke up the next day and ate the rest.
Rather than deal with what was going on in my life, I turned to food in an attempt to suppress my emotions. I equated food, particularly desserts, with the love I received from my grandmother. With her gone, and my living a solitary existence in Durham, my eating was out of control.
Then one snowy night in Durham I got a call, out of the blue, from Anna Wintour.
She was in London and the connection was bad, but the tone of her voice and the fact that she had called me at all told me something was wrong. Her mother, Eleanor Trego Baker, had died.
The phone line went out soon after she told me. Then it rang again; this time it was her husband, David Shaffer. He was in New York with the children, and a wild blizzard had shut down the entire Northeast. S. I. Newhouse had offered to send him to London by private plane but it would not be able to take off in the storm.
“Anna shouldn’t be alone right now, but the children and I can’t get out of New York because of the blizzard. I thought since you’re in North Carolina, perhaps you can get a flight farther south and get over to England?”
“I will do my best.” The storm was not as strong by me, but it was snowing, and there were cancellations. I managed to manipulate and navigate and get on a plane to Miami. We sat on the runway for hours, waiting for them to deice the plane, but eventually we took off, and I got on an overnight flight from Florida to England.
I arrived just in time to change and drive directly to the crematorium. Anna’s father was there, as well as her brother and sister. From a pew in the back, I watched Anna give her eulogy. She was close to her mother, though she didn’t talk about her that much. So it was a shock when, at the end of her eulogy, tears welled up in her eyes. Anna broke down, in front of everyone, and ran out. I instinctively got up and walked beside her, cradling her in my arms as we made an exit. It was perhaps the one time I really ever held Anna Wintour.
Love comes in many guises. Love must be kind, and it must be a two-way street.
Loyalty between two persons in an alliance of true friendship is a noble human endeavor. In true friendship, a human being finds strength. Good times or bad; the highest peak or the lowest valley in one’s life. While I was under her employ, Anna never shared any personal details of her life with me. Not her divorce, not her father’s death, nothing. But in this moment, I was not her employee, I was her close friend. We officially made up and began spending time together socially.
—
For the next few years, I lived in Durham and commuted to New York and Paris when I had to, staying in a suite at the Royalton or the Ritz. Graydon Carter hired me as a style editor for Vanity Fair, and it was for Graydon that I accomplished some of my favorite photo shoots. Many were hyperbolic attempts at fashion satire, and just about all of my shoots ran, with all the expected pages. It was a breath of fresh air, doing a photo shoot and then actually seeing it run in the magazine!
One winter night in Paris, 1996, Karl and I were talking about the current wave of big hoop skirts on the couture runways, which had been started by Galliano but found its roots in the nineteenth century. The inspiration of Scarlett O’Hara was clearly being splayed across the Paris runways. Stories in Vanity Fair were supposed to relate to Hollywood or something iconic in the minds of artists and cultural critics, and I started to think about using Gone with the Wind as a possible reference point. It is an entertaining film but not one of my favorites. For obvious reasons.
Photograph by André Leon Talley for Vanity Fair This spontaneous style conjures the memory of my father, who was a passionate amateur photographer, with his own darkroom and developing equipment. When he died, I put his favorite camera in his casket.
Back in my first museum show, volunteering with Mrs. Vreeland, the exhibit had showcased Scarlett’s curtain dress, along with several of Scarlett’s other gowns and dressing gowns. I’ve seen the movie many times and can appreciate the scope and scale of the costumes, the grandeur, the rich, saturated colors. But seriously, can anyone who is black and in their right frame of mind enjoy this film? The answer is no. The one great thing about it is that Hattie McDaniel, in her brilliant supporting role, became the first African American to be nominated for and win an Oscar.
If I were going to draw inspiration from Gone with the Wind, it would have to be in a way I’d be comfortable with. And then it hit me:
“Let’s do an updated Gone with the Wind and have Naomi as Scarlett. ‘Scarlett in the Hood!’ ”
Karl loved it, and we immediately began to plan out our shoots, using his appropriately grandiose interior décor. We would cast fashion’s heavyweights to play the servants: Galliano, the star of couture, was cast as a house servant, mopping floors.
Manolo Blahnik, the Bernini of shoes, as a gardener, and barefoot! Gianfranco Ferré, then running Christian Dior, would be Hattie McDaniel, in white shirt, custom-made piqué apron, and head scarf.
Naomi Campbell was posed, running up and down staircases, having dinner parties, in haute couture by Dior and Givenchy, an enormous vintage articulated
diamond Cartier snake necklace, and the most expensive evening gown Karl Lagerfeld had ever designed for Chanel, costing over $200,000. Naomi played the role with such ease and joy, it almost made you forget the reality. If we were being historically accurate, a black woman would never have been able to play a grandiose grande dame of the nineteenth century. Lost in fantasy, that’s what it’s all about. I wanted people to think: What if?
Photograph by Karl Lagerfeld
At Karl Lagerfeld’s elegant hôtel particulier in Paris. Naomi Campbell as Scarlett O’Hara saunters down the grand staircase in strapless haute couture, spring 1996 Givenchy, from John Galliano’s first ever couture collection in Paris. Graydon Carter dared to trust me and let us cr
eate the story for Vanity Fair on our own.
Those images mean something totally different today than they did back in 1996
when they were shot. Fashion shows were exceedingly blond at the time. Designers would say they couldn’t find anyone of color who looked right for their show, which was just hard to believe. Pushing back in such a subversive way felt bold and daring. Again, it was a quiet form of activism. My way of approaching diversity in the world of fashion was to communicate with the power of suggestion. I would not go up to Karl Lagerfeld and say, “Where are the black models on your runway?” Instead, if I didn’t see a moment of diversity, I would sit next to him and recommend girls who were missing.
“What about Naomi Campbell, wouldn’t she look great in that suit?” I never demanded representation and diversity of models; I finessed.
Most of the European designers whom I was close to rarely if ever needed finessing.
The Battle of Versailles took place before I came to Paris, and black American models like Bethann Hardison and gorgeous Indian models like Kirat Young had had no trouble booking work in Paris since then. Karl, Yves, and Givenchy had always had beautiful models of color, ever since I’d known them. But trends would ebb and flow, and some years there would be plenty of black girls on the runway and some years there were very few. “Scarlett in the Hood” was powerful for that moment in time because in the midnineties there were very few. Does that photo shoot mean anything to the world all these years later? What is the legacy of a fashion photo shoot in Vanity Fair? In 2001, Alice Randall published the critically acclaimed novelette The Wind Done Gone. Perhaps she was inspired by this photographic satire. Fashion is not an industry that lives in the past, but rather carries its past along, like a shadow, wherever it goes.
In stark contrast, my knowledge and my past are what carried me through my career. My mind was constantly volleying the words of my grandmother and Diana Vreeland. One day in Durham, I went to my computer and sat there from seven in the morning until three in the afternoon, writing down my memories of them both. I knew it was in me, and I knew what I had written was important and powerful.
I called John Fairchild, still of WWD and W, and asked to see him for lunch. He invited me to Le Bernardin, a five-star restaurant. Mr. Fairchild dissected me as I glided to his table. Over lunch, I pulled out the pages from my Hermès attaché case and asked him if he would read them. I wondered if he would destroy me or praise me after he had reviewed them. I had no idea. But I knew he wouldn’t simply dismiss what I had written, like other former employers would have. He promised to seriously consider my pages, and a few days later, he called to say he would happily publish what I’d written, prominently, in W. Which he did, alongside photos of Diana Vreeland and my grandmother, the two women who expressed unconditional love to me.
Anna Wintour called me, furious, when it ran. How could I give my work to W, which was not a Condé Nast entity at that point? I told her exactly why: “I had to take it to Mr. Fairchild because I knew he would read it seriously and publish it respectfully.”
She had nothing to say to that. But I could almost feel her disapproving gaze bearing down on me through the phone. The nuance of silence. I knew she wouldn’t have taken the time to read the thirty pages that I had written. Mr. Fairchild, on the other hand, had always nurtured my writing.
My first memoir, A.L.T., was a product of those pages. That book is something I’m immensely proud of, and if you read that book you’ll truly get a sense of what shaped my personality and my aesthetic eye early on. But I still had to bite my tongue about certain people, for fear of reprisal.
When the book was written and close to publication, Anna wanted an advance galley of A.L.T. immediately. She wanted to be the first to read it. We were in Paris and I handed it to her in the car, on the way to a dinner. She read it overnight and the next morning said, “This is wonderful.” To celebrate she threw a black-tie dinner in my honor on a Monday evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A dozen close friends were invited: Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Ahmet and Mica Ertegun, Alexis Thomas (my friend from church), Lord and Lady Black, Diane von Fürstenberg. That is how Anna Wintour embraces a book—not by reading early drafts or giving notes, but by giving a party with the most prominent social denizens of New York. This was a supreme moment in the chiffon trenches.
—
In the fall of 1996, the entire Council of Fashion Designers of America went en masse to Washington, D.C., to honor the Nina Hyde Center for Breast Cancer Research. A White House visit and a gala at the Smithsonian Institution were arranged for the occasion, to be held in honor of Kay Graham, of The Washington Post. Anna Wintour loved Kay and considered her a friend and mentor. Anna invited me to come to D.C.
with her, to the White House and to the black-tie gala.
Ms. Graham also hosted a luncheon at her Georgetown home, in her legendary Billy Baldwin–decorated dining room. The luncheon was in honor of Diana, Princess of Wales. To my surprise, I was seated to the right of Diana. This was indeed an honor. I was the only black man in the room.
Princess Diana wore a lavender Gianni Versace suit with a slim pencil skirt. I remember her asking me: “Lettuce? Lettuce?”
I didn’t get it. I said, “Ma’am, lettuce?”
“Lettuce and Diet Coke?” she continued.
“I’m sure they’ll bring you a Diet Coke, if that’s what you want!”
“No, no. I suppose that’s all they eat, lettuce and Diet Coke?”
A pregnant pause in the conversation followed, and me with a blank stare.
“The supermodels! I suppose they only eat lettuce and drink Diet Coke?”
It finally made sense to me. “Contrary to that general myth about supermodels, I can assure you that in my experience many of them have the appetite of linebackers!
Literally!”
(If you wonder which models have linebacker appetites, I am not going to say. I will, however, say that once between two shows, back-to-back at Oscar de la Renta, a group of models, who will not be named here, requested that I send out for a bucket of KFC.
The bucket of fried chicken arrived backstage, and in seconds, there was nothing but the empty container. It was as if a school of piranhas had attacked it. Before people became obsessed with kale salads and almond milk, top models ate steak, french fries, and, yes, lettuce…on their hamburgers. Lettuce and Diet Coke are not in my memories about Naomi, Linda, Christy, Stephanie, or Cindy.)
As the luncheon continued, I made a colossal blunder. My elbow knocked Princess Diana’s red wine glass straight into her lap. There was an audible gasp at the table. I said to myself, inside my head, Oh, well, this is it, you’ll never be asked anywhere ever again. You are sunk.
With grace and total ease, Diana dipped the edge of her linen napkin in her water glass and looked at me with a beautiful smile as she blotted her dress. “Oh, it’s nothing,”
she said.
The whole table relaxed their shoulders. Thank God! I thought I was going to be ostracized forever from the social elite!
—
Almost two years had gone by since I’d left Vogue in 1995, and yet my heart was still with the magazine. I told Karl I was thinking of going back.
“You better convince her to take you, and you better stay there this time,” he said.
We didn’t need to sit down and hash anything out; that’s not Anna. When the time was right, I told her I wanted to come back, and she said fine. She did not make me grovel, nor beg, but simply agreed to take me back and went over what my new role would entail. Being creative director was no longer an option; Grace Coddington had already been named to that position several months after I’d left. I would now be an editor at large.
I moved back to New York from Durham and got back into a full-time work routine.
I continued to escort Anna and share her chauffeured Mercedes-Benz sedan in Paris, to the twice-yearly ready-to-wear collections and often to the haute couture in January and Ju
ly.
I also shared the car with her in Milan for the ready-to-wear collections, the lifeline to the commercial success of Vogue. My dapper and dandy appearance was paramount, though my position on the masthead had been lowered.
Although my new role was technically a freelance position, I was given a small office on the Vogue floor. I had my monthly “Life with André” column to do, and reported to a new editor, Alexandra Kotur, who had quickly become one of the great foundation personalities at Vogue. She never lost her sangfroid. I covered the collections and continued to serve as an ambassador for the Vogue brand, going to social events and networking, which was a large part of the job. But my schedule was set around Anna Wintour’s fittings, as all her clothes are fitted and altered for her. I would observe and offer my keen eye for fittings of dresses from Chanel, or discuss fabric swatches from Prada, hers exclusively. Milan fittings for coats by Fendi, supervised by the late Carla Fendi, were some of Anna’s most important appointments.
No one else was ever allowed to attend these luxurious fittings. As I recall, Grace Coddington once said, “André is the only person who has been allowed to see Anna Wintour in her underwear.” That’s not exactly the truth; Anna always displayed complete and correct modesty when fitting her countless couture frocks. Fittings usually took about thirty minutes. No hemming and hawing, no conversation. Anna puts on the dress, you say your opinion, change this, change that, and it’s on to the next one. If you were ten minutes late, you’d miss most everything. Sometimes, we both arrived before the team from Paris. They’d rush in shortly after, out of breath, and measure and alter the toile in silence.
The worst fittings were when we had to go to Alexander McQueen. I’d always try to wiggle my way out of it, feigning an illness and announcing I was heading back to the hotel.
“Oh no you’re not, you’re coming with me,” Anna would say. Maybe she was scared to be alone with him. I know I was. He didn’t talk. He had so many demons and he didn’t trust people. Not even a fellow Brit like Anna. I would extol and be enthusiastic and positive about the clothes, but he was always very withdrawn, and quite frankly his shows were not my favorites. Even though he was considered a genius, it came from a dark place.
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