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Nonfiction

Anna Wintour Is Not the Star of André Leon Talley’s Memoir. He Is.

André Leon Talley writes, “My clothes are like ceremonial seventeenth-century Italian armor.”Credit...Ike Edeani for The New York Times

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THE CHIFFON TRENCHES
A Memoir
By André Leon Talley

In America, if you are black and aim higher than the reach history has set for you, the white gaze will try to leech your spirit of its racial identity. Very often, it will succeed. Such is the case with the fashion fixture and former Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley, whose memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches,” is at once a summing-up of his decades-long career and a pointed commentary on how whiteness works.

Talley grew up in Durham, N.C., raised by his grandmother while his parents pursued careers in Washington, D.C. His childhood consisted of school, church, cousins — and Talley’s favorite place, the library, where he discovered Vogue. Although he writes about having dreamed of meeting Pat Cleveland (one of the first black models he saw in the pages of Vogue), it was the magazine’s depiction of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball — a refined world where “bad things never happened” — that appealed to Talley most.

After watching the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Talley became obsessed with Jackie. “I created my fantasy world through Jackie Kennedy,” he writes. “A hefty diet of fashion glossies and fashion supplements taught me everything I needed to know.” Among those lessons was how to be a Francophile, an identity Talley embraced, majoring in French studies at North Carolina Central University before earning a scholarship to Brown University, where he would receive his master’s and begin pursuing a doctorate.

Talley planned to become a French teacher, but his personal style and Kabuki makeup caught the attention of two affluent white students who brought Talley to his first fashion show. There, he met the legendary editor Carrie Donovan, who told him that New York City was the only place to be if he wanted to work in the field. He abandoned his studies, packed his most precious items — “My navy coat, two pairs of velvet Rive Gauche trousers, two silk Rive Gauche shirts, and my first bespoke black silk faille smoking shoes” — and made his way to the Big Apple.

Thanks to a letter of introduction from a friend’s father, Talley landed an apprenticeship with the former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. He writes: “She must have loved the idea of my presence, the combination of my looks, tall and honey colored; my impeccable manners and grooming; and my blossoming unorthodox style. Plus my master’s degree!”

Talley is not exactly honey-colored, but choosing a euphemistic description for the color of black skin has long been a way to make blackness less black to white people. Still, it’s the bit about his master’s degree that’s most soul-crushing — the Studio 54 version of W. E. B. Du Bois’s black double consciousness: Let me in! I’m not black, I’m honey-colored! And I’m articulate and clean and educated!

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“I loved to dance and I loved that moment, that great fandango dip of Diana Ross,” writes Talley of this 1979 picture from Studio 54.Credit...Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images

Talley climbs the ranks of the magazine elite, spending three years as a writer for Women’s Wear Daily before being promoted to its Paris correspondent, launching himself into a dichotomous volley between self-erasure and performative pride.

“I had arrived in a place where I was accepted and where I now belonged,” Talley writes. “My blackness was not important. What was important was that I was smart.” And then, a few paragraphs later: “I was always seated on the front row at the couture and ready-to-wear catwalk shows, the only black man among a sea of white titans of style.”

Can his blackness simultaneously be unimportant, and also allow him to stand out among white titans?

When Talley is accused of stealing sketches from Yves Saint Laurent and giving them to Givenchy, he writes, “A black man is always getting accused of doing something egregious.” But then he turns around and asserts: “I knew my very being was shocking to some people. That I was black, sure, but also that I was so tall and thin, that I spoke French meticulously” — as if being black were secondary to his physique and aplomb with a foreign language.

Paloma Picasso, Talley’s “friend” — there are many “friends” in “The Chiffon Trenches” — discloses that the Yves Saint Laurent publicist Clara Saint had been “going around all of Paris” calling him “Queen Kong”; and later a white male editor publicly humiliates Talley, accusing him of sleeping around with designers (“insinuating I was just a big black buck”). Both are hurtful to Talley, particularly the comparison to an ape: “It dehumanizes us, implies that we are less than human beings.”

And yet, Talley doesn’t directly challenge anyone about the racism. His time working at Ebony magazine gets a single chapter, revealing little about what it was like to be embraced by black industry insiders who were proving to be as important in the fashion world as their white counterparts.

Meanwhile, Talley cultivates a relationship with the celebrated creative director Karl Lagerfeld, and is ushered back into the white, Eurocentric fashion world as a front-row guest at the German designer’s debut Chanel show: “This was the apex for me. I was lucky to be a friend of Karl Lagerfeld. The color of my skin … mattered not.”

By the time we arrive at the point where Talley admits, “I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman,” he has already belittled himself in about 50 different ways.

Throughout his career, Talley relies on Lagerfeld and other wealthy white patrons to maintain the lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed (his insistence on the latest Louis Vuitton luggage is a theme). There are people he called “friends” who made racist remarks about him behind his back; who cut him out of their social circles without reason; who thought nothing of taking him off important guest lists. There are people for whom he was their first or only black friend, who staged an intervention with Talley about his weight but remained silent when he was the object of cruelty.

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“Anna Wintour, sexy as ever in a short sundress,” writes Talley, who is wearing a bespoke seersucker suit, Chanel sunglasses and a straw newsboy cap by Jean Paul Gaultier.Credit...Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Talley is twice relegated to purse-holder: first for Paloma Picasso, then for the longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour, with whom Talley had a notoriously fraught relationship. The sordid details of their association are no doubt the reason most people will read his book — but, while they manage to be both heartbreaking and devoid of emotion, and are perhaps compelling in a Freudian context, these nuggets are the least interesting aspect of Talley’s story.

For all its name-dropping, backstabbing, outsize egos, vivid description and use of words like “bespoke” and “sang-froid,” “The Chiffon Trenches” is less about the fashion elite than it is about a black boy from the rural South who got swallowed whole by the white gaze and was spit out as a too-large black man when he no longer fit the narrative. But the white gaze has done its work, and Talley’s disconnect to blackness — his own and others’ — is palpable. As in the introduction, where he writes about “great strides” for black folks in fashion, his mention of efforts by the black former model Bethann Hardison to diversify the industry feels hollow. “People forget to think about diversity,” Talley writes, “but they forget less when there are people in place who put them in the moment where they must really think about it. A moment of awareness of black culture.”

Indeed, a moment.

Rebecca Carroll is host of the podcast “Come Through: 15 Essential Conversations About Race in a Pivotal Year for America” and author of “Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir,” due out next February.

THE CHIFFON TRENCHES
A Memoir
By André Leon Talley
Illustrated. 304 pp. Ballantine. $28.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Creative Differences. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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