The Chiffon Trenches

by André Leon Talley

  I didn’t know what to say. Quietly I listened as Anna and Oscar explained their concerns. It was pretty clear most of the concern was coming from Anna and the rest of them had been pulled into this. None had had the forethought to warn me, though.

  Maintain your dignity, I thought. Just keep it together until you can get out of here.

  After they were done speaking, Shelby asked if I’d be taking the flight. “I’ve got to think about it,” I said, and walked out of the room.

  I never got on the plane that day. And for a year after I pretended it never happened, instead trying to fix my dietary problems myself. I only got bigger. I sent a note to Anna, telling her I was ready to go to Duke and get help. She arranged for me to attend and Vogue paid for the entire program. The first week, I lost twenty-four pounds.

  The second week I lost twenty pounds. I sent Anna Wintour weekly e-mail messages about my progress. Each week I lost more weight and I was happy to be in an environment that cared for me and educated me, medically and emotionally, on obesity.

  I stayed at Duke for three months, until spring, and in that time I learned the value of calories, diet, exercise, and, the hardest part, mental wellness. I never wanted to go to the therapy sessions because I knew I would never be able to discuss my childhood trauma, the root of my emotional weight issues.

  When I got back to New York, I’d lost fifty-five pounds. There was a startling change in me at first. I could once again don my pale gray suit for a TV interview in the Vogue art department. And I went on to wear my navy blue suit in a special on the Oscars. For a while, dieting worked. I bought a rowing machine; I walked early in the morning before the day began. Anna even encouraged me to play tennis before dawn. I did this for a while…then I just fell off the wagon. It was hard to keep up the skills I’d learned and remain disciplined in my eating. I eventually gained all the weight back.

  Since then, I’ve returned to Duke three times. It’s been a yo-yo battle I long ago realized I will never win.

  Overwhelmed by my increasing weight, I turned to gastric Lap-Band surgery, under an assumed name: Dolly Longstocking. My dear friend Alexis Thomas came to the hospital predawn and prayed with me (and my Russian anesthesiologist). She is the chair of the trustee board of our church in Harlem, Abyssinian Baptist Church. Our bond is fashion, but more than fashion, our bond is our faith. She guides me through the rains and the storms. Later that day, she came back and spent the entire night in a reclining armchair in my room. I spent the first week of recovery at her home in Brooklyn, where I drove her mad with my requests for crushed ice and ginger ale.

  For Christmas, I gave Alexis Joan Crawford’s perfect vintage mink coat, bought at auction at Doyle Galleries. She earned it with her unconditional love, but she seldom wears it; she chooses to wear her own mink, bought with her own hard-earned money.

  Such is a proud woman!

  The Lap-Band didn’t work for me. It’s supposed to make you feel like you’re gagging if you eat too much, but that never happened for me. Once again, I failed to keep the weight off.

  Karl Lagerfeld, on the other hand, lost all his weight and kept it off for the rest of his life. At one point, Karl was as big as I was. He used to come home at the end of a day’s work at Chanel and consume several frankfurters cold, right out of the refrigerator, like a rabbit nibbling on a carrot. In fact, during his open-fan fat-shielding phase, Karl loved nothing more than a steady diet of late-night cold, raw frankfurters, with several glasses of Coke Light in fine Baccarat crystal and huge slices of Emmental cheese.

  When he decided to lose the weight, Karl leaned into it with his enormous wealth, relying on doctors and others to come up with the best possible diet. We would go to elegant lunches, with beautifully set tables and flowers, and Karl would order steamed fish and vegetables, and maybe a hot soup. And then, while everyone else at the table ordered dessert, Karl would have his man split open a space-age package of chocolate powder, which Karl poured into a fine porcelain bowl of hot water and stirred to a creamy, almost mudlike consistency.

  Gradually Karl was getting thinner, and his wardrobe reflected his new physique.

  People asked how he lost the weight but he kept his regime a secret. I don’t know exactly what the regime was, but I know for sure it did not include exercise. He did have one craving that he found difficult to give up—bread. It is my own personal downfall as well.

  On trips, he would pack one small Goyard suitcase with his favorite bread. He would chew the bread, savoring every bite, and then spit it out into a napkin. That seemed like a lot of trouble, but it worked for him, apparently, as he eventually lost one hundred pounds.

  Once Karl was skinny again, he would comment on my eating choices. If I had a glass of wine, he would say, “Are you supposed to really have wine? It has sugar in it.”

  Although he chided me for my dietary habits, Karl still accepted me no matter my size. A fat man is always a fat man on the inside, no matter how skinny he becomes on the outside.

  Lee Radziwill also had very serious concerns about my increasing weight.

  One day, Lee summoned me to her apartment on East Seventy-second Street in Manhattan. She wanted to see me most urgently. I arrived, and she motioned for me to sit right next to her on her fine custom-made sofa; it was the scale of a boxcar, so deep and cushioned. “André, I love you. I want you to go and see my doctor, I want you to talk to him and he will help you with your weight problem.” Lee made me feel like a child whose best friend wanted him to get well. She stroked my hands and was gentle with me. She intervened with the fragility of someone who was not afraid to recognize her own frailness and demons. Lee was special.

  I took her doctor’s name and went to go see him, but only once. He was a psychotherapist, and it cost me five hundred dollars for forty-five minutes. I thought to myself, I don’t have the time, nor the money, to put toward this. Coming from a Southern black culture and upbringing, I was taught to just get on with it. We don’t have time for therapy and self-reflection. I regret not pursuing Lee’s suggestion more; it would have been a much-needed investment in wellness.

  The last of the three times I went to Duke Diet and Fitness Center (Anna got S. I.

  Newhouse to foot the bill each time), Maureen Dowd profiled me in The New York Times. She opened her text by busting me: She caught me eating biscuits at the Siena Hotel, where I lived during my months-long journey at DFC. I spent Christmas and New Year’s there that year. It was bleak. Very bleak. On holidays, I cave in to the memory of love, and associate desserts and eating with the love I experienced at my grandmother’s table. She was a great cook, and sweets crowded the side console cabinet during Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  I have no answer as to how to overcome this. I will try until I die, every day. Just keep trying to be well. Enough said.

  —

  Iintend to leave in my will that I am to be cremated in a caftan.

  After gaining back the weight following my third and final visit to Duke, I came to terms with the fact that I would never again be skinny enough to wear traditional clothes; no more bespoke English suits. Somehow everyone seemed pleased with me in caftans, so I simply continued to collect them, wearing them from morning to night.

  There are still times when I need a traditional suit, for a wedding or a funeral, and I go to Ralph Lauren for custom-made suits, including one of my favorites, a banker’s gray three-piece suit he made for me for my cameo appearance in the first Sex and the City movie: I had no speaking role, but I am still recognized on the street from that brief appearance on film.

  Caftans are my wellness retreat in terms of my daily, individual style. Do they hide the worst human flaws? Yes! Are they elegant? Yes!

  As I slowly embraced the comfort and ease, my designer friends began asking if they could make caftans for me. Diane von Fürstenberg made me numerous caftans using the original silkscreen fabrics from her own collection, like one in black with pink surreal lips, which I loved.

&nbs
p; After that, I met Ralph Rucci, who, in one fell swoop, cut me seventeen couture caftans, from swatches of very expensive silks. These are the foundation of my caftan life.

  I have had brilliant black silk moire from Taroni fabrics by Ralph Rucci (two of them) and my samurai warrior trapunto caftans, inspired by a great exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009: Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156 to 1868. From that moment on, I decided to wear nothing but caftans, as a man could be dressed in something like a tunic, or floor-length dress, and be appropriately dressed.

  I love my caftans and the evolution of them, including my cotton seasonless shirts in red and black, which are ordered from Au Fil d’Or, the large souk in Marrakech, and made by an ancestor of Monsieur Boujima, who had first made all the passementerie for Yves Saint Laurent’s collections in the 1980s. My court capes and ceremonial coats, by Tom Ford, are some of the most brilliant looks I am privileged to wear. My favorite one is an embroidered blue court coat. I wore it for a portrait by Jonathan Becker on my favorite bridge, Pont Alexandre III, in Paris. The portrait accompanied a definitive feature article in Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair.

  My personal style evolved over decades, and it is fundamentally the awareness that a man can dress with splendor, in full-blown over-the-topness, and be admired for it.

  I am proud of my knowledge of historical style, how men dressed at the French court, with powder and curls in their wigs, fully adorned in ruffles, jabots, satins, and jackets that swung as they walked, like great skirts. Men wore heels; just look at the portraits of Louis XIV by Hyacinthe Rigaud—he wears not only heels, but red heels and white stockings on his shapely legs.

  My clothes are like ceremonial seventeenth-century Italian armor. They are like traje de luces, bright pink capes lined in yellow, worn by matadors as they enter the bullrings in Mexico and Spain, or like the tight-fitting boleros and trousers of the great flamenco dancers. Capes and caftans suggest ceremony, a sense of formality. I may not be in a three-piece or two-piece business suit, but as much thought goes into my caftans as is required of my bespoke tailors from London, Richard Anderson and Huntsman.

  Yes: I was using the caftans to shadow the rise and fall of my adipose crisis. I was bloated by weight, bingeing on sweets, whether it be marble madeleines and hot chocolate in Paris or the rich dishes offered at New York’s finest restaurants. I was never insecure about who I was, how I looked. I never thought I was ugly. I never thought about my looks to begin with; I only thought about my clothes. In the cruel and sometimes fickle world of high fashion, I know I was quietly judged. Despite sometimes feeling like a manatee, I kept my pride intact. My confidence remained high at all times.

  To me, caftans were the culmination of historical inspiration and collaboration with great designers like Valentino, Ralph Rucci, Tom Ford, and an unknown man, quietly sewing in a crowded hole in the Barbès section of Paris.

  In 2008, Valentino designed for me two incredible caftans to wear to his three-day celebration in Rome. Carlos Souza coordinated the fabrics, and when I arrived in Rome as a guest, I ran to his couture house for fittings. I had a canvas toile made for the shape; two vintage couture fabrics from the Valentino archives had been selected for me: a green cotton with huge black jaguars, and a brilliant Chinese dragon motif, edged in neon green and red. Both caftans were worn over custom-made Charvet of Paris cotton shirts and white dinner shirts.

  Valentino’s three-day party was extravagant, including a first-night dinner held in the famous Roman Forum. I was housed in the luxurious Hotel de Russie. Upon checking in, I had a handwritten note. It was from an Italian artist, Riccardo Ajossa.

  I met Riccardo back when I was young, in a Roman television studio, where I went to escort Naomi Campbell for a popular television variety show. He was an intern, standing in the hallways, and he was memorably kind. We later kissed at a glamorous nightclub. He was young and beautiful, like a Bronzino portrait of a young nobleman.

  Riccardo used to give me tours of Rome. The kindest, most beautiful man.

  We had lost touch, until Riccardo read in the daily newspaper that I was in town, as a guest of the Valentinos, and my hotel was mentioned. Thus, the note, and thus, our reunion.

  Riccardo’s specialty is traditional fine Korean hanji papermaking. He has been a professor at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma since 2000. Soon after Valentino’s party, Riccardo came to New York, for a solo show, in East Hampton. It was titled Leaves of the World. He stayed during the week in my house and slept in my bed, next to me, but we never touched. This was pure romance to me: an Italian artist, who lives and works for his art, in my bed.

  Riccardo speaks perfect English, so there is no language barrier. He has eyes the color of pale, pale jade, or sea foam, and locks of curly black hair. He lives alone, with his beautiful white English boxer, named Zoe, and is dedicated to his teaching and art, some pieces of which he has given to me. While we are close, sexual intimacy has no place in our relationship. He has not returned to New York since his show, now years ago, in East Hampton. I hold out hope that he will one day return.

  —

  Yves Saint Laurent died in his rue de Babylone home, with Pierre Bergé on one side of him and Betty Catroux holding on to him from the other. After three decades, Betty had finally convinced Pierre that, like a sister, she could be trusted to protect Yves.

  Pierre lost so many battles over the years trying to keep Yves and Betty apart. Yves lived as he wanted; Betty was his kindred spirit. She loved Yves unconditionally. After Yves died, Pierre gave Betty one of the Andy Warhol portraits of Yves. Their long-fought relationship of mistrust and doubt had finally ceased.

  Anna Wintour asked me to attend Yves’s funeral on behalf of Vogue. Protocol was heavy; there were selections of rank, like in the French courts. Pierre Bergé must have done a seating chart. Happily I was seated on the Vogue aisle with Susan Train, in the eighth row. If I had not been with the magazine, I’m sure I would have been seated in the very back. The front row was full of important people: Betty, Loulou, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. All the major designers went, out of respect for Saint Laurent’s legacy.

  Karl Lagerfeld did not go to Yves Saint Laurent’s funeral. He sent flowers to the church, a huge arrangement of white roses, with a handwritten note: “In memory of our better days, of our youth. ”

  When I got home, I called Karl to tell him about the service. He said, “I don’t go to funerals.”

  Three years after Yves died, Loulou also passed. I couldn’t make it to her funeral.

  But I do remember her in the front row at Yves’s funeral, looking beautiful in a fedora.

  Anna Wintour asked me to write something for Vogue in memory of Loulou; it was not printed, and it was never explained to me why not. Possibly because there were so many tributes to Loulou, like Joan Juliet Buck’s, which ran in another publication. Here is an excerpt of what I wrote:

  Louise Vava Lucia Henriette de la Falaise was élégante, with the fortitude of Leyland cypress and the fragility and polish of a Fabergé egg. She worked marathon hours, but when her brother Alexis de la Falaise suffered from lung cancer, she was at his bedside nearly all day and night. Her idea of luxury was languishing in the tub in her Moroccan blue tiled bath, with flacons of bath oils poured generously into the water, or gardening at the romantic country home in Boury-en-Vexin she shared with her husband, Thadée, or threading a group of friends into a garland of personalities for a supper party that would last nearly ’til dawn. Charming, incandescent, she could ignite a dull room with her throaty Lauren Bacall laugh, and lifted lagging conversations or negotiations with an insouciant remark. She had the best Irish qualities—loyalty, down-to-earth when it mattered, a sense of self, and confidence.

  She was best at presiding over her tables of sketches and designs for accessories at Yves Saint Laurent. She admitted when she first joined the inner sanctum, including Anne-Marie Muñoz, she simply stood around and suggested colors. No matter how hard she loved
to party, she took work and life seriously. One of her last projects, she curated the definitive Rive Gauche exhibit, at the Pierre Bergé–YSL Foundation in Paris, last year, which captured the essence of that groundbreaking moment when fashion broke away from couture and afforded women, and men, the ability to walk into a Rive Gauche boutique and find everything from Belle de Jour velvet dresses to plaid shirts with kilts. In my last conversation with her, she wanted me to be sure to attend the opening night. I went to the exhibit and called her, to leave a message that it was extraordinary.

  Betty has kept all her original Yves Saint Laurent couture and Rive Gauche clothes, nearly three hundred items. Her husband, interior designer François Catroux, designed a private mini-museum at their home for the looks. The Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent will soon mount an exhibit solely consisting of Betty Catroux’s personal archives.

  There is a haiku poem by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Bashō that sums up how I feel about Betty:

  I sit here.

  Making the Coolness,

  My dwelling place.

  —

  During my time at Vogue, I had been involved in cover discussions featuring some of the most powerful and influential women of their time, including leading actresses, singers, models (of course), and even First Ladies.

  Upon the election of President Barack Obama, Anna Wintour arranged a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, to discuss Michelle Obama’s first Vogue cover.

  I had met the soon-to-be first African American First Lady of the United States before, at Oprah Winfrey’s house. Oprah was having an all-girls lunch at the time of the Legends Ball and invited me along to Santa Barbara. She took Tina Turner and me on a golf cart tour of her estate, and afterward she sat me next to Michelle Obama for dinner.

  I said to Mrs. Obama, “I know who you are because I saw you standing in the aisles of the convention while your husband spoke.”

  She said, “Well, I certainly know who you are.” That was all she said, but I liked her instantly. Anna and I hosted a fund-raiser with her, early in that historic run for the presidency, and I would go on to attend all of Anna’s private fund-raiser dinners for candidate and then president Obama.