Maybe I should have had the foresight to suggest an exhibit that would include the work of Deborah Turbeville and Karl Lagerfeld. Why didn’t I say, “Karl, wouldn’t it be great to have a dual exhibit of Deborah’s photographs of Chanel’s early creations and your first collection from January 1983?” Or something that would give Karl the attention he so loved. Karl’s ego would not allow him to support another artist in the realm of photography, as he was also a photographer who had shot nearly two decades of Chanel ad campaigns, for both couture and ready-to-wear. He may have loved Turbeville’s work, but she was now dead.
The mood at the table remained cold. On top of my colossal blunder, I had brought this all up in front of Karl’s new clique. Several of them were extremely jealous that I had been seated at the show in the Rita Hayworth convertible next to Geraldine Chaplin and with Anna and Karl. That must have put the final nail in my coffin. I was riling up his new favorites, and now I dared ask him for money to support another artist? The guillotine dropped. After decades of friendship, I had finally made the list of erased, deleted personal and professional friends who were no longer of any value to Karl. The only people he never had a fight with were people of great power, like Princess Caroline of Monaco.
Karl Lagerfeld never reached out to me again. Chanel removed me from the guest list for their runway shows and removed me from their Christmas gift list.
Did I miss Karl Lagerfeld? Yes.
Did I miss the strict protocol required to be his friend? Yes!
Kate Novack, the director of my 2017 documentary, The Gospel According to André, sent multiple queries to Chanel, asking to interview Karl. She was ready to fly to Paris to talk to him. There was never an answer.
Finally, Amanda Harlech called me and said by telephone, “Karl told me to tell you to tell Kate to stop asking for an interview for the film. He said he doesn’t like talking about the past.”
I accepted his response, hung up the phone, called Kate, and told her. There would be no interview in Paris with Karl Lagerfeld. I was already just another ghost from his past.
XIV
My heart, formerly committed to Vogue, now belonged to SCAD, which had become a destination where I could create important fashion exhibits. Being an editor at large gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted, and SCAD offered me the possibility and creative freedom—and a stress-free, staff-supported environment—to create magic. I began spending more time there and asked friends in New York to donate haute couture for the SCAD museum collection.
It began with Anna Wintour’s large donation of haute couture pieces. She went through her racks of suits and dresses from Chanel, Dior, and Valentino couture and brought them to the office. She allowed me to select certain pieces, which went off to SCAD.
Cornelia Guest donated the entire couture wardrobe of her late mother, C. Z. Guest.
She shipped down everything, including one of the earliest Oscar de la Renta little black dresses, from when he designed for Jane Derby, in the 1960s, as well as her Mainbocher evening coat in framboise silk, to the floor; a full-blown broadtail fur dinner dress, from Max Mara; her lamé Chanel suits; and cashmere sweaters, mink lined, by Adolfo. Just to be complete with the official donation, there were scores of C. Z.’s Kmart housecoats and matching nightgowns.
Deeda Blair donated Chanel tweeds and Ralph Rucci ball dresses, with matte alligator bibs attached to huge, sweeping silk faille skirts.
Pat Altschul sent her entire Yves Saint Laurent couture collection of trouser suits, with matching silk blouses with huge bows, and her major Balmain couture pieces, which she loved to wear. She sent one of my favorite dresses of all time, São Schlumberger’s Chanel summer black cotton organza and lace strapless dress, inspired by Winterhalter, as well as a long amethyst silk faille opera coat that she ordered one season but never wore. Her Balmain at-home chiffon caftans, edged in ostrich, couture of course, and right out of the Joan Rivers fashion DNA, were also donated.
One day, I went to the museum and asked to see the growing costume collection. All the closets were open and I sat there, quietly scanning the collection. The idea for an exhibit was born: The Little Black Dress.
To me, this first venture as sole curator of a fashion exhibit was a masterwork in my legacy. It felt like one of my greatest moments.
The exhibit included an amazing Saint Laurent couture dress (1990)—inspired by a photo of Marilyn Monroe, taken by Avedon—owned by Anne Bass. She lent it for the exhibit. There was Diane von Fürstenberg’s black Valentino couture slip dress (1991), inspired by Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8; Norma Kamali’s latex rubber one-piece cutout dress (2012); Balenciaga’s baby-doll lace (1957); the most exquisite Fortuny Delphos dress of black fine-pleated silk (1907), from C. Z. Guest’s estate; Gloria von Thurn und Taxis’s wool and white braid coatdress, from Chanel (1990); Deeda Blair’s amazing Saint Laurent haute couture lace dinner dress (1999); and Zac Posen’s homage to Charles James in a nylon crinoline and horsehair construction (2013). Anna Wintour’s black wool Chanel couture dress (2006), as simple as a T-shirt, ended up as the cover for the Little Black Dress book, published by Rizzoli and edited entirely by me with the help of SCAD. Paula Wallace approved every single aspect of the exhibit; she also wrote a foreword to the book.
Diana Vreeland always had the unexpected element of shock and awe in her shows.
Marc Jacobs’s black embroidered lace shirtdress (2012) from Comme des Garçons was my breakout surprise for The Little Black Dress. Jacobs had worn the lace dress to the Met Gala that same year, totally transparent, yet buttoned to the top of his neck, with pristine Ben Franklin–style Pilgrim-buckle shoes he designed for himself. He was nude underneath, except for the most impeccable custom-made white cotton boxer shorts.
The other element of surprise: Mica Ertegun’s sapphire-blue silk taffeta shirtwaist, tucked into her gorgeous flamenco-red silk taffeta long ruffled skirt (2001), from Oscar de la Renta. Why did I select this? Mica, another great style icon, ordered the dress for her fortieth wedding anniversary dinner and ball, held on the roof of the St. Regis that year. She said to me, over lunch at the Frank Gehry cafeteria at Vogue, “Everyone will be in their best black dresses from Paris or something so fantastic from their closets. I want to stand out and I am going to Oscar for something that goes with my ruby bib necklace by JAR.”
I considered including a little black maid’s dress in the exhibit. A new black maid’s uniform to celebrate all the African American maids who had worked in the segregated South. I couldn’t find the right uniform and ended up not including it. In hindsight, I wish I had. The maid’s uniform was the little black dress for the suppressed, repressed, and oppressed. Its inclusion would have been a symbol for all the maids who wore the uniform, fed families, and saved and scrimped and put children through fine Southern schools of higher education. And for all the maids who overcame what that little black dress symbolized. Failing to include it is one of my greatest regrets.
—
Diane von Fürstenberg kept saying to me for years, “You must reconcile with your mother. If she dies and you have not reconciled, you will never be able to live with yourself.”
Since my mother had moved into an assisted living home, she would not take phone calls. I offered to put a private phone line in her room, but she didn’t want it. She told me she wanted nothing but to rest. She was fine not receiving people, except for close cousins from her church family, and taking occasional communion served by the deaconesses. She, like Mrs. Vreeland, just took to her bed and waited to leave the world, with her own sense of the world internalized.
The only way I was going to see her was to go unannounced, which I did three times. The last time I saw her, she smiled and was happy to see me. All was forgiven. I gently brushed her hair and asked if there was anything I could do for her. She only wanted me to bring her a bag of Lay’s potato chips, a simple request for something she craved. I rushed out and bought several large bags. “I am just going to rest fo
r a while now,” she said upon my return. “I am fine.” Life for my mother, Alma Ruth Davis Talley, “ain’t been no crystal stair,” as Langston Hughes wrote. When I was eleven, she divorced my father, William Carroll Talley, and in those days, black women rarely divorced a man unless he really behaved in some egregious manner. My father had not.
After her divorce, she always seemed a displaced person, as if she could not be moored to an arc of security or safe haven. She was never attached to anything sentimental: furniture, framed photographs, books, record albums, old clothes, linens.
With my grandmother to look after me, my mother was not tied down emotionally to anything.
In the middle of the 2015 fall/winter collections at New York Fashion Week, my cousin Georgia Purefoy called to tell me my mother had died. I was stunned and unsure how to respond. I blindly went to the next fashion show on my schedule. Oscar de la Renta, on West Forty-second Street. Throughout the show I was quiet but polite. I didn’t tell a single person that my mother had just died. But I made sure I was seated near the bank of elevators, so I could be the first person to leave.
Oscar’s show ended, to thunderous applause. I was out the door and into the small elevator. We were about eleven people, including a pregnant editor. As we made our way down, the elevator stopped abruptly and then shut down.
For the first ten minutes or so, we all remained calm. After that, for over forty minutes, I was given the task of barking and knocking the loudest. We were sardines packed in that elevator. All the while I kept thinking, My mother is dead. My mother is dead and here I am stuck in an elevator with strangers.
The New York City Fire Department finally axed its way through the ceiling and got the elevator back to normal operation. The doors opened and we were released. Whence came my strength to not break down, I do not know.
Alex Bolen, Oscar’s stepson-in-law and head of the family firm, was waiting on the ground floor. He asked if I was okay. I told him I was fine, I just wanted to get out on the dark street and breathe some air before the hour-long car ride to my home in White Plains.
In the car, Oscar called me, personally asking after my welfare following the elevator incident. The next day, he sent a vase of simple white flowers. I still didn’t tell him about my mother’s death. I couldn’t speak about it.
Before I took the flight from New York to Durham for the funeral, I went to Bergdorf Goodman and bought a long peignoir and matching long silk charmeuse gown, with long sleeves. It was the only one I liked, but I could see that someone had previously tried on the gown and lipstick was smeared, ever so lightly, on the hem. I asked the salesperson if she could check inventory for another gown, one that wasn’t stained, but she said it was the only one. I had no choice but to go with my chosen selection. It was to be FedExed to the funeral home.
Two days later, I journeyed to Durham, and Danny Filson, who had become a good friend from our time working together at SCAD, met me at the airport. He went with me to arrange the funeral and select a very expensive burial vault and a full mahogany casket, the finest one in the catalog. My mother had to be buried in the best that was offered to me. It was my duty as her only child to give her as beautiful a funeral as I could, as I had done for my grandmother. The same attention had been given to my father, although he was a Mason and they had taken over his funeral arrangements.
I went to Floral Dimensions and ordered a blanket of dense white roses. I never asked the price. They were instructed to take the orders from New York and Paris florists by phone, and to select only white flowers.
The vault was copper lined. I left nothing to chance. I selected the music: “God Will Take Care of You,” sung by Mahalia Jackson; “Blessed Assurance,” sung by Reverend Shirley Caesar; “Jesus Promised Me a Home Over There,” sung by Jennifer Hudson.
Reverend Butts flew down from Harlem to eulogize my mother; he did not hesitate when I asked him, despite never having met her. My extended family from SCAD, Paula Wallace and her husband, Glenn, came up from Savannah for the service. Paula wore a beautiful black hat with a veil covering her face. They sat in my grandmother’s favorite pew, right of center. Anna Wintour did not attend but she sent a beautiful black bench, and a plaque, to memorialize my mother.
Photograph by Colin Douglas Gray
Reverend Dr. Butts eulogizing my mother, Alma Ruth Davis Talley, at my family church, Mt. Sinai Baptist, in Durham, North Carolina. October 2015.
Pallbearers took the solid-mahogany casket to the hearse, which had to be backed up to the front door of the church. They said it was the heaviest casket they had ever carried.
All these preparations had helped me with my grief, so by the day of the funeral I was fine. I had no overwhelming emotional response, except a feeling of finality. We walked to the family cemetery behind the slow-moving hearse, on foot. On the walk, I asked the undertaker’s wife, did she remove the lipstick stain from the brand-new gown?
I didn’t want my mother to be buried with a very slight stain at the hem of the slip.
Who would ever see? It was, after all, going underneath the peignoir coat. And it was not an open casket for viewing. But I saw it in my mind. I wanted her to assure me she had removed it with some delicate stain remover. Or just cut the entire hem off. She promised me she had removed the stain.
As we waited, I took a brief tour of my family cemetery with Reverend Butts. There was my aunt Dorothy Bee, killed in a car crash just a short distance from our church.
And there, my grandmother, who had requested she be buried next to her lost daughter.
And all of my grandmother’s North Carolina sisters, as well as her mother, my great-grandmother, China Robertson.
I do not fear death, as it was always present in my Baptist upbringing: Prepare yourself for death. We all have to die one day.
At the head of my grandmother’s grave, I had commissioned a gray Georgia granite obelisk, the exact same measurements as my height, six feet six inches. As I spoke to Dr.
Butts, Paula Wallace quietly went up to this obelisk, rose up on her fine Prada heels, raised her veil, and kissed it. It was a moving tribute to my grandmother, and to me.
My mother’s black stone marker is carved to resemble an open book. I had done everything I could to make her home-going service dignified and elegant.
My mother never quite got me. I never understood what she wanted from me either.
She never explained and I never asked. I suppose we could have had a better relationship had we talked through a counselor or third party. Some professional help was certainly needed in her anger management. When she died, everyone in my family came full circle and we mourned the happier days. We all felt my mother did the best she could, under the circumstances.
I wrote in the program for my mother’s funeral: “In the kitchen, her specialty was macaroni and cheese. She loved making this dish on Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. She also loved chitlins and would practically have a tug of war over a bowl with my grandmother. My mother loved church life, and I am proud to learn she was a deaconess of this family church, in the latter years of her life.”
—
Oscar de la Renta died the same year as my mother. In his honor, I presented an exhibit of his work at SCAD; Annette de la Renta, with her daughter Eliza Bolen, flew down to Savannah with Anna Wintour to attend the opening. It was a cold winter day, and Annette was still in mourning, wearing her black bouclé wool coat. She wore that coat all that year.
As they toured the exhibit, Annette was pleased to see the collection included Oprah Winfrey’s blue taffeta dress (2010) as well as the original velvet dress Hillary Clinton wore on the cover of Vogue for Christmas (1998) and Eliza’s simple Balmain wedding dress (1998). She loved how I arranged the lifeless mannequins’ feet in a system of grosgrain ribbons deftly taped to them, to suggest sandals and elegant shoes. Vintage veils and immaculate white kidskin leather gloves had been ordered from Neiman Marcus to accompany Oscar’s grand evening dresses.
&nbs
p; Weeks later, Alex Bolen, head of the Oscar de la Renta firm, called me in New York and asked me to curate the first full retrospective of Oscar de la Renta. Annette had sincerely thought my SCAD exhibit was wonderful and wanted me to continue my work on a larger scale.
There began my career for three years, curating Oscar de la Renta exhibits at the de Young Museum in San Francisco; at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; and finally, my finest work, in my view, at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.
My initial SCAD de la Renta exhibit was small and I relied on my friends to secure the clothes. But now I had clothes from the de la Renta archives. I remembered dresses Annette and Eliza had previously worn and requested they send me my favorite selections.
The success of the show led to the publication of a corresponding book, featuring the full catalog. Published by Charles Mier at Rizzoli, Oscar de la Renta: His Legendary World of Style was edited by me, with an introduction called “Thread of Memory,”
which encompassed my thirty-nine years of friendship, comradeship, and kinship with Oscar.
The book almost killed me, literally. I lost so much of my health and my work-life balance in trying to beat the clock and be the first to have a full exhibit of my friend’s work, work I knew like the back of my hand, as well as produce the book. From the time Oscar died, in October, until the following spring, I was hunkered down at SCAD, working nonstop. And I was eating nonstop. For years now, I’d binged on all the wrong things, ignoring the value of exercise and proper caloric intake, with sweets being my greatest downfall. Chocolate anything: ice cream, cake, banana pudding, coconut layer cake, Kit Kat bars, Mounds, New York silver-dollar-size mints!
Now I sealed myself into the carriage house at SCAD and would wake every morning, attack the corkboard wall layout, and write the book while having huge breakfasts: bacon with biscuits and butter, and grits with molasses. These would be followed by lunches and dinners with all my favorite comfort foods. Everything I ate as a child. Everything I associated with love and comfort and a safe, secure home.
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