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André Leon Talley's 'The Chiffon Trenches' Documents the Rise and Fall of an Empire

Photo credit: Patrick McMullan - Getty Images
Photo credit: Patrick McMullan - Getty Images

From Town & Country

In all the coverage around the release of André Leon Talley’s memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, in the breathless column inches devoted to his feud with Anna Wintour, in the avalanche of social media mentions, in the reviews and interviews, one delicious story has been overlooked. It is the throw-away anecdote Talley recounts about the late Karl Lagerfeld and his habit, during his one-time-but-never-forgotten fat phase, of traveling with a small Goyard suitcase packed with a rare delicacy: bread. Just bread, nothing more.

“He would chew the bread, savoring every bite, and then spit it out into a napkin,” Talley writes. Lagerfeld would eventually lose the weight, famously adopting a strict diet so he could fit into Hedi Slimane’s ultra-skinny Dior Homme suits.

Talley can’t help but add: “A fat man is always a fat man on the inside, no matter how skinny he becomes on the outside.”

Photo credit: Ron Galella - Getty Images
Photo credit: Ron Galella - Getty Images

The book is brimming with poisoned little darts like that one. They are buried under yards and yards of self-pity, but they are there, inadvertently peeking out like Juicy Couture tracksuits sandwiched between piles of silk crêpe de chine.

Talley may have intended this stroll down memory lane to be a dignified Remembrance of Things Past, but in counting the receipts of all the friends who disappointed him, the industry that failed him, and the cruelties of a fickle business, he manages to wring some joy, at least for this reader, out of the hilarious venalities of this often incredible, frequently ridiculous, entirely make-believe industry.

He complains that he couldn’t get to Bill Cunningham’s memorial because he was recording a podcast for Vogue. “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,” Talley writes. He is appalled that Lee Radziwill regifted a Giacometti sculpture Marc Jacobs gave her because it wasn’t the seven foot tall edition she wanted. “She was so exacting in her taste!

With fashion at a standstill and nothing to do but despair, along comes this gift-wrapped jewel box of schadenfreude. It is a sad accounting of a once pampered gatekeeper’s fall from grace, and a catalog of hubris, hypocrisy, and high drama, much of it the author’s own, stretched over the course of nearly five decades.


That’s also what makes The Chiffon Trenches as rare as the Peregrina pearl.

For the most part, the stories fashion tells about itself are scrubbed of imperfections; they are coffee-table curios or strange hagiographies. Every now and then, a book comes along like Alicia Drake’s The Beautiful Fall, a lyrical and at times unflattering portrait of the rivalry between Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, but they are swiftly contested by the powers that be. Drake was so drained by the lawsuit Lagerfeld initiated, and lost, that she didn’t publish another book for over a decade

Talley is not a reporter, and like most fashion editors he is prone to overstatement—“Breathtakingly stunning!”—and melodrama—"Physically, I am a huge galleon slowly sailing into harbor, broken from so many battles.” What Talley is is a witness, one who saw the industry, warts and all, from the very best seat in the house, and now has a several decades worth of axes to grind.

Unfortunately, Talley’s sharpest words and exhumed bits of gossip, the kind of petty marginalia that animates any memoir worth its salt, are too often aimed at the deceased, at once influential figures like John Fairchild and Pierre Bergé who can’t retaliate anymore. Lagerfeld, who died a year ago, is often on the receiving end of Talley’s cattiest reads, and the passages about him tell the bittersweet story of a friendship doomed from the start, between a romantic and a monolith.

Photo credit: Ron Galella, Ltd. - Getty Images
Photo credit: Ron Galella, Ltd. - Getty Images

There’s a particularly harrowing anecdote about the model Tina Chow asking Lagerfeld for money for the illustrator Antonio Lopez, a once dear friend, as he lay dying of AIDS. “He never spoke to Tina Chow again. Antonio had given Karl so much inspiration when they were younger, but Karl did not like being asked for help, as I would come to learn over the years,” Talley writes. Later, he is himself vanished when he asks Lagerfeld for money to stage a retrospective for the photographer Deborah Turbeville, who had just died of lung cancer: “The guillotine dropped. After decades of friendship, I had finally made the list of erased, deleted personal and professional friends who were no longer of any value to Karl.”

But what of the living?

Despite reports of Talley’s fallout with Wintour, she emerges a mostly unscathed Regina George; whatever comeuppance awaits her will most likely be self-inflicted, if the New York Times's Ben Smith is to be believed, not because of Talley’s burn book. A braver version of Talley’s tell-all could have been his Answered Prayers, but he is far too invested in getting invited back into the club to risk excommunication like Truman Capote.

Photo credit: J. Countess - Getty Images
Photo credit: J. Countess - Getty Images

For proof that Talley’s not yet ready to throw in the caftan, just turn to the back. It’s the right way to read a memoir anyway, starting with the index and acknowledgements to get a sense of everyone's place in the pecking order. In lieu of an index, Talley offers his own best-dressed list, and it is headlined by Anna Wintour, “a global vision of fashion,” and Ralph Lauren; his thanks stretch for three pages and include everyone from Peggy Noonan to Will.i.am and Hamilton South, the publicist who inspires one of Talley’s best lines. Upon learning he has not yet received an invitation to Lee Radziwill’s funeral, Talley shrieks to a friend: “Hamilton has not called me. Do you think I am on the list?”

One of the unintended accomplishments of The Chiffon Trenches is the voice it gives to the unspoken anxieties of all the remaining Talleys stomping through fashion’s corridors of power, those suddenly realizing they may soon be excluded from the list, too.

In describing the good old days, Talley captures just how dramatically the ground has shifted from beneath the feet of his cohort while they were busy getting into their Big Apple Car sedans, and waving to each other “as we crisscrossed through early morning traffic heading uptown,” as he and Wintour used to do at the height of Condé Nast.

There was an era when Vogue could send 22 editors to the collections in Europe four times a year, and the late Condé chairman S.I. Newhouse, Jr. wouldn’t blink at handing out interest-free loans to editors or footing the bill for them to go to fat camp (Talley went three times). Now, Condé, already a shadow of its former self, is further destabilized by the coronavirus pandemic, and just last month reduced the salaries of its executives as a result.

Photo credit: Jacques Moineau - Getty Images
Photo credit: Jacques Moineau - Getty Images

Wintour, accustomed to annual couture fittings that Talley attended until recently, saw her pay cut by 20 percent. “If you’re used to staying at the Ritz your whole career, it’s going to be hard to transition down to a more economical option,” Talley notes unironically. Whether he intended it or not, his swan song is a document of the rise and fall of an empire.

The Chiffon Trenches arrives on the heels of other media memoirs thick with fin de siècle nostalgia, like Save Me the Plums, Ruth Reichl’s account of the days of wine and roses at Gourmet, and As Needed for Pain, Dan Peres’s account of the days of opioids and metrosexuals at Details. The difference is that those books saw its authors excavating the past to come to terms with the end of something.

Talley, on the other hand, can’t quite bring himself to do that. He recalls an incident of sexual abuse as a teenager that scarred him from life, one that prevented him from forming significant romantic relationships, and numerous episodes of casual and overt racism. But he doesn’t dwell on them. He reserves most of his fire for small-bore resentments, like getting dropped from Chanel’s annual Christmas gift list.

Photo credit: Dimitrios Kambouris - Getty Images
Photo credit: Dimitrios Kambouris - Getty Images

A friend of Talley’s recently told me that his Achilles heel is that he believed in the dream. The tragedy of his book is that he still does. In one heartbreaking imagined scene, he holds out hope that Wintour will turn up at his death bed, finally apologize for their estrangement and tell him, “You have no idea how much you have meant to me.”

In Talley’s universe, where sentiment is overrated and no one is in vogue for very long, such wishful thinking is verboten, and looking back the ultimate sin. “Fashion,” he writes, “is not an industry that lives in the past. But rather carries its past along, like a shadow, wherever it goes.” Wintour and Lagerfeld never subscribed to that notion; they moved ahead no matter the collateral damage. Talley, like Norma Desmond, can’t shake his ghosts. His memories are all he has.

Despite knowing better—after his many tours of duty in the frontlines, the scenes of callousness he experienced first-hand and the scores of prodigies and It girls tossed aside for younger, buzzier models—Talley pines against all reason for the “elegant miracles” that fashion can sometimes deliver. “You have to have hope,” he writes.

Photo credit: Cindy Ord - Getty Images
Photo credit: Cindy Ord - Getty Images

When he first came to Vogue, in the early 1980s, Talley was advised by his mentor Diana Vreeland to visit Susan Train, the Paris bureau chief who had herself been the toast of the city in the 1950s. Train had devoted her life to the magazine, at the expense of children and marriage, but despite her years of service, she was being encouraged to retire. She never did.

Talley took Vreeland's suggestion for what it was: an opportunity to learn from one of the greats. I hope some young fashion lover today is paying him the same courtesy.

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