Their laundry was boiled “in a big black iron cauldron in our yard”, he wrote in his 2003 memoir A.L.T., but “until I left home, I never used a towel that hadn’t been ironed”.īy the time he joined Vogue in 1983 and became a semi-public figure as Wintour’s longstanding chief lieutenant, Talley was already a legend within fashion, his encyclopaedic knowledge of fashion history set off to perfection by a glittering backstory of apprenticing for Vreeland and clubbing with Karl Lagerfeld. The grandson of a sharecropper, he was raised by his grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, whose high standards of elegance and aesthetics he credited with sparking his interest in fashion. Cathy Horyn, the fashion editor of the New York Times when Talley was in his Vogue era, recalled him last year as “a mixture of southern front-porch grandee … and persnickety Beaton-esque observer”. Talley was a complicated, contradictory character. The auction is poised to be an elegant signoff from a man who believed fervently in the transformative power of fashion. Scratch below the surface bling of the auction’s most eye-catching lots and you will discover a collection that speaks to his championing of black talent (a gold brocade caftan by the influential Harlem designer Dapper Dan, which he wore to a New York fashion week show by Carolina Herrera) and his love of art (a clutch of Warhols, a portrait of former Vogue editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland by photographer Horst P Horst and a signed portrait of Karl Lagerfeld by Helmut Newton). Warhol’s Candy Box (True Love), in Talley’s collection. And, in an elegant twist that Talley would have adored, it is the luxury wardrobe on which he splashed his fortune that will serve to portray him in a more flattering light. He forged a pioneering path to become the first person of colour to reach the highest ranks of Vogue, and his death at the age of 73 left a king-size void on the front row. Having grown up poor and black in the still-segregated US south, he won a full college scholarship and graduated with a master’s degree in French from Brown University. But Talley was a more creative, more interesting, smarter and kinder person than any of that. When Talley died, the gaudy inventory of his possessions and tales of unpaid rent and a painful exile at the hand of Anna Wintour seemed to paint an operatic, bittersweet portrait of an overdressed and overwrought figure. There are no fewer than 29 Louis Vuitton trunks up for grabs (including one that made a cameo appearance in 2008’s Sex and the City film), along with a Prada coat in white crocodile and an orange liveried Hermès bike that Talley never rode but kept in storage at the Ritz in Paris. A Chanel navy silk faille opera coat could be snapped up for about £3,000 (scattered “sun damage” is noted), while two extra-large Birkin bags look a steal at £4,000. At an auction at Christie’s in New York of the personal estate of André Leon Talley, the former American Vogue creative director who died last year, they might be yours for a guide price of £400. If you’re in the market for a size 13 pair of Manolo Blahnik snakeskin evening slippers edged with crimson satin ribbon, then 15 February could be your lucky day.
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