The Chiffon Trenches

by André Leon Talley

  The show included Farida Khelfa, a great model and muse of Azzedine Alaïa, and the iconic Marisa Berenson, movie star of the seventies and model. There were Tom’s Hollywood friends: Rita Wilson; Julianne Moore; Lisa Eisner, who collaborated with him on jewelry; Rachel Feinstein, the New York–based artist.

  Suddenly, the bombshell, breaking-news surprise: Beyoncé, not on the front row but on the catwalk! As she began her strut, she turned to Tom Ford and gave him a big wink and a smile. She wore a stunning long-sleeved short dress, all dark silver sequins, evoking smoke covering her ultra-voluptuous silhouette. Her hair was a full-blown curly Afro. When she began her walk—and, by the way, she has never walked the fashion runways again, to my knowledge—the room roared.

  Tom knows his duty is to be a commercial designer, but he also knows he is a leader among the pack. While these clothes looked absolutely great on models like Stella Tennant, he knew how to create fanfare by simply shifting back to old-school style yet bringing it into the cultural moment of celebrity. Each individual was appreciated for her own personality and body shape.

  The small, intimate setting was exclusive; no more than about two hundred guests attended. Tom put a blockade on the photographers, which he now admits was a mistake. He was thinking exclusivity, the way the established houses used to handle things.

  A great fashion show makes me feel good, like attending church on a Sunday morning. I felt privileged to be a part of it, a professional hallelujah. I may have been off the Karl Lagerfeld top ten friends list, but I still remained fiercely loyal to Tom Ford, who has continued to support me no matter my weight. After each of his shows in Milan, Paris, and New York, I have always rushed home to dispatch an e-mail with my immediate thoughts on his collections. Some e-mails are stream-of-consciousness and wildly romantic, and some are quiet. If I don’t understand his message, I simply do not send one. That has happened only once in our many years of friendship.

  XVI

  V ogue started a podcast in 2016 and Anna announced me as the host.

  The podcast started off with a big, successful roar and a roster of huge guests: Tom Ford, Kim Kardashian, Marc Jacobs, Alexander Wang. Anna quietly directed the whole thing from her office. She did not approve of many of the interviews I wanted to do, like Missy Elliott or Maya Rudolph. We instead stuck to insider fashion. Tonne Goodman would come down and talk about the next Vogue celebrity cover. Grace Coddington and Phyllis Posnick would come down, too. Even Anna came down and participated in conversations if she found my guest interesting enough.

  Bill Cunningham, the great photographer, died in June 2016 from complications of a stroke, at the age of eighty-seven; I was one of the few invited to the private requiem mass at St. Thomas More, his regular church, which he attended every Sunday, when in town. On the day of this incredible mass, I couldn’t attend. Michael Kors, the American billionaire fashion designer, was scheduled for a podcast interview with me at the same time the mass was being held. I kept my professional obligation to Vogue. While Anna attended Bill’s funeral, I was in the podcast room, talking to Michael Kors (who clearly was not invited to the requiem), doing my job.

  And for peanuts in salary, really. I think I may have been paid five hundred dollars for each podcast. My car service bills cost that much and more for a round-trip from White Plains to One World Trade Center. I never complained; I just kept going and doing the best job I could for Anna and for Vogue.

  Then, like a morning fog that suddenly lets up, the podcast no longer existed. No explanation or financial severance compensation. Just sphinxlike silence from Anna Wintour. She decimated me with this silent treatment so many times. That is just the way she resolves any issue. And I soldiered on, through the elite chiffon trenches. But, at the age of sixty-nine, I decided I was old enough, and it was time, to stand up for my dignity and take this silent treatment from the great Anna Wintour no more.

  —

  Graydon Carter’s retirement from Vanity Fair was announced on the front page of The New York Times in September 2017, with a full detailed profile inside the broadsheet. Retiring saved his legacy: He was the last great editor of Vanity Fair magazine. His replacement supposedly was paid half of what Graydon made.

  Recently, we compared notes on Anna Wintour, and there were some similarities.

  He said to me, “One day she treats me like a good friend and colleague, and the next day, she treats me as if she had just handed over her keys to an unknown parking valet.”

  I was a friend to Anna and I knew I mattered back in our earlier days together.

  Today, I would love for her to say something human and sincere to me. I have huge emotional and psychological scars from my relationship with this towering and influential woman, who can sit by the queen of England, on the front row of a fashion show, in her uniform of dark glasses and perfect Louise Brooks clipped coiffure framing her Mona Lisa mystery face. Who is she? Does she let down the proverbial dense curtain? She loves her two children and I am sure she will be the best grandmother. But there are so many people who worked for her and have suffered huge emotional scarring. Women and men, designers, photographers, stylists; the list is endless. She has dashed so many on a frayed and tattered heap during her powerful rule.

  In spring of 2018, I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, working on the Oscar de la Renta retrospective at the Mint Museum. At the same time, my documentary was making its New York debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. I was booked and busy.

  Two weeks into the final organization of the show, I realized I hadn’t received any e-mails from Vogue with details pertaining to my red carpet interviews for the upcoming Met Gala, to be held on the first Monday in May. Generally someone at Vogue called and formally requested my presence weeks beforehand. They paid me a small sum, but it wasn’t about the pay. Rather, it was something I looked forward to all year.

  The theme that year was Heavenly Bodies. I called up Vogue and asked what was happening. Why hadn’t I heard from anyone yet?

  “Oh, this is beneath you now, to do these interviews,” I was told.

  I took the call in stride, but really, it was a terrible way to find out my services were no longer desired. What truly perplexed me was that the previous year, for the Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons gala, Anna had loved my interviews. She told me they were “great,” which I distinctly remember because she rarely, rarely, complimented me.

  This was clearly a stone-cold business decision. I had suddenly become too old, too overweight, and too uncool, I imagined, for Anna Wintour.

  After decades of loyalty and friendship, and going through the peaks and valleys of the chiffon trenches together, Anna should have had the decency and kindness to call me or send me an e-mail saying, “André, I think we have had a wonderful run with your interviews, but we are going to try something new.” I would have accepted that. It was absolutely fine to take another direction, younger, a blogger or Instagram star with seventeen million followers. I understand; nothing lasts forever.

  Simple human kindness. No, she is not capable. For years, Anna was the most important woman in my universe. I bottled up how hurt I was, as always, but our friendship and our professional alignment had just hit a huge iceberg. I later found out it had been Vogue’s digital staff that had decided to replace me, not Anna. I knew there was a change in the winds at Vogue, but I never thought I would simply be thrown to the curb.

  My friends told me just to accept what had happened, move on, and take my assigned seat at that year’s Heavenly Bodies–themed gala. And I did, in a resplendent bespoke Tom Ford black double-faced faille cape and cardinal-like coat with a black sash. But for the first time, I didn’t go to Anna’s hotel suite to see her final touches of hair, makeup, shoes, and jewels selection. I showed up to the Met, passed by the hall where I would normally do my chats, and took my seat, like any other guest, at a table with Vera Wang, Zac Posen, John Galliano, Rihanna, Cardi B, and Jeremy Scott. A fake smile stretched across my big black lips, and my hands cle
nched in silent disgust. I didn’t want to create a scene, but I couldn’t help but think, This is beneath me, to sit here pretending I am okay with Generalissimo Wintour.

  Benny Medina, a major talent agent, interrupted my internal combusting: “Where were you earlier this evening? Why weren’t you on the steps doing your thing? Jennifer [Lopez] was looking for you and when she didn’t see you, she kept walking.”

  “I’m glad to know that,” I said.

  Annette de la Renta entered the room, in her black guipure lace, flounced Velázquez evening dress (it was Oscar’s favorite dress he ever made for his wife, from his New York collection). On the way to her table, she gave me a warm hug and I felt the love. I realized then that in all my years of knowing Anna Wintour, we had never shared this feeling.

  Annette moved on to her table and I felt suddenly, refreshingly, resolute. I stood up.

  Vera Wang asked where I was going; I told her to the men’s room, but instead, I swept and swirled my Tom Ford cape through the exhibit and down the back corridors of the Met to my waiting car.

  On the way home, I swore to myself in that moment: I will never attend another Anna Wintour Met Gala for the rest of my life.

  —

  Throughout the rest of the summer, I did not hear from Anna. Then, in September, I received an e-mail from her assistant, asking if I would be attending Anna’s Chanel couture fitting on October 17, one day after my birthday. I said yes, out of a sense of loyalty, not out of friendship.

  Anna did not wish me a happy birthday that year, not even sending an e-mail wishing me many happy returns, as she usually did. Our friendship was officially, sadly, over. I attended the fitting, during which we exchanged no more than courteous pleasantries. Afterward, I sent her a glowing e-mail, remarking on how great she looked in her new black velvet draped skirt and top with an embroidered soft breastplate of armor done in intricate hand-sewn sequins. She responded almost immediately: “Thanks for making the time.”

  On her birthday, November 3, I sent her a celebratory e-mail. She did not respond.

  I wonder, when she goes home alone at night, is she miserable? Does she feel alone?

  Perhaps she doesn’t allow herself to feel these things, as she clearly is a person who does not dwell on the past.

  In a broad sense, I do not see Anna, in her relationship to her editorial staff, or to me, working out of a higher sense of morality and spirituality. This is not to suggest she is altogether void of these human factors. She certainly is guided by them with her children and as a result is a great mother.

  As Jackie Kennedy famously said: “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”

  There is no doubt Anna Wintour is the best mother to her two children, Charlie and Bee. She raised her children to be exceptional human beings. She has nurtured them from infancy to adulthood, and now they are both in happy marriages. Ultimately that’s what matters most in life.

  You might think I see myself as the victim in my alignment to Dame Anna Wintour.

  I do not. When we began our united trajectories at Vogue, she treated me with respect and with the concern of a friend, one who really cared. She gave me the opportunity to reach the pinnacle of the mastheads of HG and Vogue.

  I’ve shared the great moments of her rise to becoming the most powerful woman in fashion. What drives Anna is a sense of her own ability to survive as a power broker, with sheer brute force, and to sustain an extraordinary level of success. Failure is not an option to her, in her life, in her career. She has held her position as Vogue’s editor longer than anyone in history, thirty years.

  While I continued on as a freelancer my last few years at Vogue, I was never officially let go from the magazine by Anna Wintour or any other staffers. No one ever said, “You are fired, you should retire now.” I remain on the masthead, even now, as a contributing editor, though I rarely go to the office. However, I continue to attend every single fitting of Anna Wintour’s Met Gala dress, including hair rehearsals and jewel selections, right down to the Manolo Blahniks.

  —

  The Met Gala is the Super Bowl of fashion. Anna Wintour reinvented the party in 1999, eventually using her power to micromanage every single detail while simultaneously raising over two hundred million dollars. In 2014, the Met’s Costume Institute was renamed in her honor: the Anna Wintour Costume Center. Michelle Obama, as First Lady, cut the ribbon at the official reopening. Anna deserved this honor, due to her great fundraising abilities; the Gala supports and finances the entire department. She is devoted to the museum and is a board trustee member.

  Pivotal to her success is her laser focus on her Chanel (or Prada or Galliano Dior) couture looks. She has leaned on my advice for the crucial process of two or three fittings per dress, and I’ve always considered it an honor to be asked to attend. Over the last nineteen years, I only ever missed one Met Gala fitting; it was at Dior, in Paris, 1999, when she selected a red fox sleeveless vest and amethyst tulle skirt from Galliano’s great couture collection.

  Sometimes these fittings begin in Paris, but most are in New York at the Lowell Hotel, or the Chanel headquarters on Fifty-seventh Street, or directly in Anna’s home.

  Anna considers it her duty to be at her very best on the opening night of the Met Gala.

  Despite my wounded ego and insecurity, I continue to advise her out of sincere loyalty, no matter if she remains silent.

  She will perhaps not like it that I revealed the process, but I finally take my fealty and flip it because I feel it’s important to say, that I have helped her chisel out her optical moments for the most important night in the elite fashion world. If she asks me to attend her couture fittings after this book is published, I will be surprised.

  I am not sure Anna ever really wanted me to become something larger than the role she perceived for me. She compartmentalized me as someone who served her as a trusted expert, religiously attending these key fittings for her wardrobe. She depended on my instinct for the deft nuance of her Chanel couture fittings. And for the last five years, I’ve gone without fail to her fittings, as a loyal friend, because it is expected of me.

  I have paid my own car bills from White Plains to Manhattan to attend these fittings.

  Never once did Anna offer or ask how I was getting home. She considers it a privilege, that I must be honored to attend these very private moments in her personal life and would do whatever is necessary to attend.

  Anna is so powerful and so busy; she simply put me out of her existence. When I saw her socially, she used to come and sit next to me, and we would chat, superficially, but we had something to say in an even exchange. Now she treats me as a former employee, brief greetings, never anything more than perfunctory salutations. The only words exchanged are vapid demonstrations of politeness: “Good morning, André,” or “Thank you for coming.” No superficial queries, nothing. Like any ruthless individual, she maintains her sangfroid at all times. She is always dashing in and out, and I do believe she is immune to anyone other than the powerful and famous people who populate the pages of Vogue. She has mercilessly made her best friends people who are the highest in their chosen fields. Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Mr. and Mrs. George Clooney, are, to her, friends. I am no longer of value to her.

  The last true moment of grace I received from Anna was her interview for the documentary The Gospel According to André. Speaking to the director, Kate Novack, Anna Wintour told the truth. She verified my important role, or one aspect of it, in her life as editor in chief of Vogue. It was my knowledge of fashion that she found key to my ability to contribute. I was so pleased with her generous words in the film, which is now part of the National Film Registry at the U.S. Library of Congress.

  The Empress Wintour, in her power, has disappointed me in her humanity. Our friendship has layered with thick rust, over the years. We went through thick and thin. I considered her part of my extended family. She moved on. No birthday e-mails, no gifts
at Christmas, just polite and correct greetings and platitudes in public. Power through those platitudes Anna, but where is the truth to power, your human kindness? My hope is that she will find a way to apologize before I die, or if I linger on incapacitated before I pass, she will show up at my bedside, with an extended hand clasped into mine, and say, “I love you. You have no idea how much you have meant to me.”

  Not a day goes by when I do not think of Anna Wintour.

  XVII

  Iintroduced Lee Radziwill to Martin Grant, the cigarette-thin, blue-eyed Australian designer.

  Martin would say, frequently, that watching Lee and me together was like watching “two battling princesses.” Verbal sparring was our forte, especially on fashion, restaurants, and who was really well dressed in both Paris and New York. Lee actually thought few women could wear the title “best dressed.”

  When I first took Lee to Martin Grant’s small Paris atelier, she was cautious, somewhat doubtful of his talents. She tried on her first custom order from this man and was sold. In fact, Lee loved Martin’s designs; they were quality in fabric, simple in cut, and timeless. They also had an androgynous feel, which Lee favored. She rarely wore skirts or dresses in her last decade. She loved trousers and baseball-style or aviator jackets, made by Martin, upon request. I remember her ordering a white goatskin one, as well as a matte leather one in chalk white.

  Martin somehow reflected Lee; he was nearly the same size and height as she was.

  She became his couture muse; he learned from her, and from the day they became friends, his clothes became fine investments, the kind of clothes Vogue editors might eschew for editorial pages but consider the go-to choice of an elegant individual. Candy Pratts Price and I were the only editors who went routinely to Martin’s biannual presentations in Paris. As I recall, his clothes were never called in. Martin’s own survival in the chiffon trenches is due to his self-taught skills of technique and appreciation of luxurious fabrics, and his antennae, raised at all times to a modern aesthetic.