The Chiffon Trenches

by André Leon Talley

  “What the hell are you saying?” she screamed back.

  “Sparkle,” I roughly translated.

  Sparkle she did, and she continues to do so, illuminating the fashion galaxy.

  Wearing a black agbada by Patience Torlowei of Nigeria. Photograph by Alessio Boni, 2019. Photographed at the Paradise Club, in the New York EDITION hotel.

  XX

  One of the most prophetic American designers, Marc Jacobs has always been a loyal friend and an inspiration. At his first show at the Plaza, he showed a white mink trench coat and black-watch plaid skirts, and I knew he was going to the top.

  I will treasure forever the memory I have of Grace Coddington, Tonne Goodman, and me at a Louis Vuitton fashion show, fall/winter 2012. The show, always the last one in Paris Fashion Week, opened precisely at ten A.M. in a glass dome built in the courtyard of the Louvre.

  As a double screen recessed, steam rolled across the seated audience and a custom-made French locomotive moved slowly to the end of the two-sided catwalk. I thought in that moment of John Galliano’s fall 1998 couture fashion show, which had models coming off a train, but that fashion extravaganza had taken place at the Austerlitz train station. Marc Jacobs supposedly spent four million dollars building this train for this set in secret. Throughout the fourteen-minute show, models emerged from the train’s cabin, each with a liveried porter carrying glamorous totes, hatboxes, hard boxes, and beauty cases. It wasn’t just about fashion; Marc crossed into the realm of fashion performance as artistic installation. The history of Vuitton, originally a house of luxury travel accessories, was in the forefront. I was proud to see an American of such talent create such a show.

  After the show climaxed and the glass-domed hall emptied, Grace, Tonne, and I sat there in tears, joyful in our hearts and grateful we had witnessed such genius. The romanticism of the show was so overwhelming. This show defined Marc’s extraordinary ability, as did so many moments at Vuitton, especially in the early days when he showed under the hot pyramid of the Parc André Citroën in Paris, in the middle of the afternoon.

  Anna Wintour always adored Marc and helped him land his job at Louis Vuitton, where he soared. In a fifteen-year span, he took Vuitton from a prestige luggage house to the most influential fashion house in Paris. At the same time, he had the genius, and the fortitude, to maintain his place atop the Mount Everest of fashion. The eponymous Marc Jacobs fashion line always closes out New York Fashion Week with collections that become prophetic to the industry and are original, fierce, and unorthodox.

  For fifteen years, Marc managed to uphold his rank as arguably the most anticipated fashion presentation of both the Paris and the New York fashion calendars.

  That is unprecedented. He maintained his standing, often with controversy, especially when some of his shows were two hours late. And then in a total reverse and about-face, his Marc Jacobs brand would show precisely on time, at eight P.M. If you were not in your seat on the front row two minutes before the show began, tough luck. You had to stand in the back.

  Rich or poor, Marc has always kept close to his core friends: Rachel Feinstein and her husband, John Currin (both critically acclaimed artists); Lil’ Kim; Kate Moss; Robert Duffy (his longtime business partner); Naomi Campbell; Debbie Harry; Christy Turlington; and Lee Radziwill, who spent months shopping for Marc’s duplex apartment in Paris, just in view of the Eiffel Tower, purchasing the right Christofle silverware, Baccarat glassware, fine dinner plates, and luxurious sheets from Porthault.

  I often picked up Lee on the way to see Marc’s shows in Paris. She was a true friend to both of us. Unfortunately, she was no longer with us for Marc’s wedding celebration, at the Four Seasons in Manhattan.

  Marc Jacobs’s wedding to longtime boyfriend Char Defrancesco represented a certain moment in time where the world had suddenly become more accepting and accessible to gay men. A sincere and legal celebration of their love, done their way.

  Embraced and respected, rather than career destroying. The year 2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s May 2019

  Time cover was momentous, in both its existence and its seeming banality.

  The morning of Marc and Char’s April wedding, I meditated on not going. I had been hibernating in my house in White Plains for the past few winter months.

  Intuitively, something told me this wedding would be Marc’s answer to Truman Capote’s legendary 1966 Black and White Ball. It would be the key fashion wedding of the new era, akin to Paloma Picasso and Loulou de le Falaise’s respective soirees. Plus I had never been to a formal gay wedding before. No matter the effort, it was my duty, after having RSVP’d yes, to get up out of the house and go.

  I rolled up to the Four Seasons twenty minutes early, in my Tom Ford black taffeta caftan, and underneath it my Tom Ford blue silk satin shirt to the ground, tailored from fabric that artist Garrett Rittenberg bought me from Ethiopia. Parked outside, there was a sleek vintage silver and black Rolls-Royce. This had to be Marc’s. He had clearly planned for this day to be the big one. Inside the party, I swiftly rushed past a pink carpet and a photo booth installment with cardboard three-dimensional French poodles and other breeds of dogs. Up the steps, Marc and Char greeted guests in their Huntsman suits, custom-made on Savile Row. The receiving line was massive, so I walked by them slowly and zoomed around the room looking for a banquette or chair, to find my seat and take it. This was a celebration that didn’t have formal assigned seats. People roamed and walked, talked and took selfies, looked at their phones or just chilled. I found a banquette just behind the big bar in the Grill Room and dashed to claim the corner. I never moved from that seat until I left, at 2:40 A.M. the next morning.

  The only place to be that Saturday night was there. The guests included Justin Theroux, looking hot and casually dressed; Camille Miceli, Parisian fashion accessory designer at Dior; Delphine Arnault, the daughter of Bernard Arnault of France; Virgil Abloh, creative director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear, as well as designer of the Milanese fashion house Off-White; Stefano Pilati, who flew in from Berlin (he designed the Saint Laurent ready-to-wear collections from 2004 to 2012); Bette Midler; Sandra Bernhard; accessories director at Vogue Candy Pratts Price and her husband, Chuck Price; English photographer Robert Fairer; creative director of Allure Paul Cavaco; Helena Christensen; and Grace Coddington, the high divinity of Vogue’s fashion editors, who honored Marc by wearing a pair of silk custom-made pajamas: a beautiful tailored soft shirt and loose, elegant trousers. Grace is still the same; she doesn’t change. She was escorted by fashion genius Joe McKenna, who had worked closely with Azzedine Alaïa.

  Anna Wintour came early, in a Marc Jacobs dress, and stood and talked to Marc and Char on the receiving line. She stayed forty-five minutes, a respectable amount of time, for her. I saw her from a distance, but she didn’t see me. My seating situation was too valuable for me to risk getting up and losing it, so I stayed firmly installed on my cushiony banquette.

  As I sat with my back to marvelous glass Austrian curtains, it felt like being back in the golden days of fashion. It was an extraordinary coming together of the fashion community, and everyone was there to celebrate love.

  Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele appeared and sniffed out a seat beside me on the banquette. She wore her Azzedine Alaïa fringed sweater. Black. Her Uniqlo jeans. Black.

  And her signature look, an armful of swag: pavé diamond bracelets and a huge, gaudy vintage Rolex women’s watch, with the face completely in pavé diamonds.

  On her feet were gold leather Manolo Blahnik thongs, with a sensible heel. I asked her later how many pairs of these gold shoes she had. She showed me a photo on her phone of rows and rows of gold thongs.

  In my career at Vogue, I worked with three amazingly talented and gifted editors: Carlyne Cerf, Grace Coddington, and Tonne Goodman, who is the only American out of the three. Each with her own unmistakable style helped to create Vogue through visionary and brilliant fashion editori
als. I never touched them in their genius for the visual message of a fashion page. It takes a woman to translate the beauty and the pragmatism of a dress. I never could reach this troika of fashion luminaries.

  Marc Jacobs’s wedding was like a reunion of the best of the best of Vogue. Cerf and I sat the entire night, toasting Marc and greeting everyone from our perch on the black leather banquette. We fueled our happiness with chilled shots of vodka, sitting there watching the world go by.

  DJs Fat Tony and Tremaine Emory shared the booth and created a soothing high-voltage old school–meets–new tech soundtrack. Everything seemed to blend, like a delicious fashion smoothie.

  The party started with Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell (who wore a black Balmain couture cape, to the ground, with matching sparkled bra and trousers), who came along and posed for the hired photographers in a group series of photographs. Video artists were also roaming the plains, capturing this historic lovefest for Marc and Char.

  Early in the evening, two huge Jumbotron video screens showed Marc and Char the day before, walking down a red corridor in their Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Rye residence, where they held their formal wedding. For the vows, they both said, “I will never float away from you.”

  Toward midnight, the giant wedding cake was cut and served to nearly seven hundred guests.

  The whole event was so like the nights in the seventies when Nan Kempner would dance on the large speakers at Studio 54 in YSL couture, or Grace Jones would dance on the tabletops of Club Sept with no underwear. The music made the madness; it made the evening. I just sat there and enjoyed watching the fashionistas run up and down the stairs, including African model Alek Wek and black designer André Walker, a friend and an unsung genius.

  Little napkins, white linen, made for the occasion, were embroidered with two lovebirds seated on the same branch, with the words “Never Float Away.” I folded one in my hand, to take as a memento.

  I never got the chance to speak to Marc and Char that evening, but they know I was there, as evidenced in photographs and videos. When it was time to leave, I asked André Walker if he would usher me down the stairs, as I had sat in one spot too long, slowing my circulation.

  As I slowly rose, like an old elephant shocked by some unknown noise from his slumber, André walked backward before me, orchestrating my tired legs, assuming the stance of a Graham technique instructor. Quietly, he gestured and spoke in low tones, urging me down the steps in a glissade that would have been perfect had I been leaving a party in eighteenth-century Versailles.

  Marc thinks of everything; on the way out, there was a gift bag for each guest with a sweatshirt with the emblem of two lovebirds on a branch. Each guest was given one or two, but I had failed to see them. I found out later and asked Marc if he could send me two sweatshirts. He first offered to make me a special sweatshirt like a huge caftan. I told him no, not necessary. He sent me a box with two of the sweatshirts. I will keep them in the box forever, the way I have kept in my fur closet his special gift of a Louis Vuitton mink blanket, monogrammed with the LV logo, like the luggage, full-length for a king-size bed. I also treasure a navy and black mink throw from his final collection at Vuitton in 2015, and in my home in North Carolina is a special gift of four-piece, custom-made hard-box Vuitton luggage he designed in black, without the monograms.

  —

  Vanessa Friedman, fashion critic for The New York Times, called Anna Wintour “the magical manipulative Wizard of Oz” in an article on the 2019 Met Gala. She described Anna’s Chanel haute couture pink ostrich-feather cape and exquisite column of a dress in pale, waffle-weave bouclé tweed and embroidered flowers on a nearly invisible green treillage as “a subtle impression of a pink flamingo.” I disagreed with her on that description.

  Since she took over as chairwoman of the event in December 1999, Anna Wintour has reinvented for herself the role of gatekeeper, and tsarina, of this worthy cultural institution. She has also raised close to two hundred million dollars.

  This year, the headlines read like this one from the Daily Mail: “The year the Met Gala lost its sparkle: Critics blast guests’ ‘stupid’ outfits while favorites Beyoncé, Rihanna and Bradley Cooper skip it and others say the ‘self-indulgent’ extravaganza has finally jumped the shark.”

  Mercifully, I opted out at the right time. Two thousand nineteen was indeed the ball of the emperor’s new clothes, or, as one of my best friends said, “Halloween at the Met.”

  It’s now a ball where young YouTube influencers are suddenly skyrocketed to positions of credibility. And most often these so-called social media influencers are devoid of any knowledge of taste, fashion, or culture.

  Jared Leto went with his severed head, fashioned after Alessandro Michele’s Gucci autumn/winter 2018 show, where the models held versions of their own heads. Gucci, by the way, carried the whole weekend, in a series of incredible luncheons and events to launch its beauty line. They, along with Condé Nast, underwrote this year’s magnificent nightmare.

  Katy Perry came as a chandelier, in a short dress that actually lit up. Later, she changed into a giant hamburger, with pickles, ketchup, and a bun. Her head poked out and people, from photographs I reviewed online, took nibbles at her during the party.

  Billy Porter, the breakout star of the FX series Pose, came in on a royal couch, à la Cleopatra, suspended in air by six strong, half-dressed men in gold trousers. He arose from the couch and did an art deco version of some mythological man-insect right out of an Erté drawing.

  Cher, who came with Marc Jacobs about three years ago, was now the dinner entertainment. She showed up ironically in blue jeans with holes at the knees and belted out tunes, with a bright fuchsia and black lace camisole under a big black jacket, and a huge frilly, fluffy Jean Harlow blond Afro wig.

  Legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz was invited by Anna to sit at her table and lend some gravitas to the evening. Ms. Leibovitz had been the partner of the late Susan Sontag, author of “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” She showed up in elegant attire, a black smoking suit by Christy Rilling, which was beautiful from the photographs I saw online: flattering and worn with a soft, gentle white ruffled shirt. Annie brought her three daughters, all in long, flowing dresses, to the pre-dinner reception.

  My replacement on the live-stream video was a young African American female, a YouTube star with some seventeen million followers. Vogue stands for excellence in everything, but I was told that on Monday evening, even the live-stream feed experienced technical difficulties until people chimed in from the Internet. Eventually the live stream cleared up.

  What could this talented YouTuber offer? Surely she didn’t know what a martingale back is to a Balenciaga one-seamed coat. Or did she know that Katie Holmes’s Zac Posen dress, worn with great elegance, constructed with great technique, was an homage to the master architect Charles James, who was the subject of the 2014 Met exhibit Charles James: Beyond Fashion? Or that Cher’s incredible Bob Mackie jumpsuit, worn to the gala in December 1974, was the forerunner to all the see-through evening dresses designed by Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy couture, now worn by Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian in this century?

  Like an extinct dodo bird, my brain, rich and replete with knowledge, has been relegated to the history books.

  In hindsight, the two best-dressed women, in my view, were Anna Wintour, in Chanel, and cape-clad Naomi Campbell in Valentino haute couture, by Pierpaolo Piccioli (who has given Valentino another life since he took over, resulting in the brand being a major influence in the fashion world). They dressed the way people should dress at this type of occasion. You’ve never seen Anna Wintour in an absurd thematic dress; she maintains deft control of her image. Chanel pink for the “think pink” theme of the exhibit and the party, awash with a pink carpet. And as Susan Sontag wrote in her essay, “Camp is a woman walking around in three million feathers.” Anna selected the pink ostrich cape as an homage to the camp theme, but she also needed a cover-up for the beautiful Chanel dress with short ca
p sleeves.

  On Monday evening of the Met Gala, I came home and planned on going to bed early to avoid the barrage of e-mails flying in with images from the pink carpet at the Met. I took a look at one or two before turning off the lights. Julia Reed wrote, “The real elegance took a train out of town a long time ago.” Anne Bass sent me a photo of a man in feathers and a cape surrounded in ostrich trim. He looked like Liberace reincarnated as Dame Edna. “Would you want to know this person if you met him at a party?” Anne Bass inquired.

  I responded with a simple “No,” and went to bed.

  —

  Tonne Goodman’s book, Point of View, was published in 2019. Now a Vogue contributing editor, Tonne reached the highest level of the Vogue masthead as fashion director and has, to date, been the editor of almost two hundred American Vogue covers. Her sister, Wendy Goodman, is design editor of New York magazine and has also penned wonderful, beautiful books.

  These sisters, Tonne and Wendy, are literally to the manor born. They grew up on Park Avenue, went to the best schools, and spent time in the living rooms of Diana Vreeland and Gloria Vanderbilt. Style is in their DNA. They have always been part of my extended family, mainly because they are both close to the Vreeland dynasty.

  In a handwritten memo dated November 2, 1970, Diana Vreeland wrote to her Vogue staff, including Grace Mirabella and Baron de Gunzburg, the Russian expatriate, about Tonne Goodman: “Please do not fail this girl—though she is not pretty—she pulls together perfect bones and proportion in an aristocrative manner.”

  Vreeland invented her own word to describe Tonne (aristocrative!) and her tall, lean, elegant cool. In 1974, there was Tonne Goodman, one of the few other volunteers at the Costume Institute, working for Diana Vreeland. We were trained in her brilliance, and under her guidance we both soared, like American bald eagles.