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Andre Leon Talley: the fashion guru gets to the bottom of what makes the fashion maven tick

Interview, Nov, 2003 by Andre Leon Talley

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MP: Who else influenced you as a black man?

ALT: Dr. Martin Luther King.

MP: Did you have a political consciousness at this point?

ALT: No. I had a sense of beauty. I loved [model] Pat Cleveland, I loved the pictures of Penelope Tree by Avedon, I loved Pauline de Rothschild. I loved any picture in Vogue that evoked a world that I didn't know about in Durham, North Carolina. I was very much creating my own world.

MP: So how did you finally get from North Carolina to New York?

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ALT: When I left home for the first time it was to go to college at Brown University, where I'd won a scholarship. I was going to school to become a French teacher, but when I got there I met people who were studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, taking art classes to become graphic artists or illustrators. They had been to Europe; they were so sophisticated. Those people opened up a world for me too.

MP: Did you dream about love?

ALT: I dreamt about visual stunningness, visual sophistication. I wanted to meet Andy Warhol, Diane von Furstenberg, Diana Vreeland. I connected to people from reading about them. I also loved people like Jimi Hendrix, and I used to try and dress like him. I went to a concert in Georgia--the first time I ever hitchhiked--all because I'd seen a picture of him in Vogue. I loved the antique military jackets he used to wear with a scarf tied around his head. The hippies were a big influence on me as well--I went through that period, too. The first time I came to New York I went to a thrift store and bought a beautiful black-vinyl cape and a Roman gladiator belt. But I never tried to be a hippie: I didn't run around in bare feet or go to love-ins or Woodstock or any of that. Even when I went to that Hendrix concert and I slept on the ground for three days, I didn't take my shoes off.

When I first came to New York I went to Le Jardin, a great disco here--this was before Studio 54, and it was the place to go--where I first met Yves Saint Laurent, Loulou de la Falaise, Steven Meisel--I met Anna Sui outside at five o'clock in the morning. The first time I saw Bianca Jagger was in November of 1974 at the Hotel Pierre. Her entrance was extraordinary. The way she came into the room with the black stockings and the walking stick. I'd seen photographs of her, and she lived up to the images. There were no men who influenced me like that, no.

MP: What was it like to be one of the only black people in this crowd? "When you were young did you feel anything, bad or good, about being black?

ALT: No, though we were aware of the civil-rights movement, of course, in my family and in my church. It wasn't something we dwelled on, but we were aware of it. For a long time my grandmother would not allow white people to come into our house. That was her rule. The only white man who ever came into the house was the coroner. In those days the coroner had to come in person to certify that a person was really dead, so he came when my great-grandmother died. But that was just the way people were back then. I went to all-black schools.

Andre Leon Talley: the fashion guru gets to the bottom of what makes the fashion maven tick

Interview, Nov, 2003 by Andre Leon Talley

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