"He had a penchant for discovering, nurturing and celebrating young designers,” his social media account said in announcing his death.
Trailblazing fashion journalist Andre Leon Talley died on Tuesday in New York at the age of 73.
His death was confirmed on his Instagram account. The cause of death was not provided.
For decades the former creative director and editor-at-large of Vogue shaped fashion and trends but was never afraid to break the rules.
Tally was born in Washington, D.C. He was born in, and raised in Durham, North Carolina by his grandmother, Benny Frances Davis, who she said had a flair for fashion and influenced her fascination with the industry.
He said that he entered Durham Library as a child and discovered Vogue, beginning his relationship with the publication as a devoted reader.
Talley attended North Carolina Central University before earning a master's degree in French studies from Brown University in the early 1970s.
Working as an assistant to Andy Warhol put Talley in a powerful position for the worlds of art and culture. In that decade she became the Paris bureau chief of Women's Wear Daily and contributed to fashion coverage in The New York Times. In 1983, he went to work for Vogue as a fashion news director and later as a creative director.
He left Vogue in the 1990s, returning as editor-at-large, and in 2013 to pursue the opportunity to run Numero Russia, a genre publication, but left after a year. As Barack Obama arrived at the White House, Talley was tapped to advise the First Family on fashion.
In later years he appeared as a judge, a final arbiter, on the reality television hit "America's Next Top Model", which was his way.
Tally's gaze was sharp and intimidating, her 6 foot 6 inch frame a preview of the wit and intelligence behind her fashion criticism.
His idea of impressive fashion involved breaking the rules, but only if you know the rules.
In 2017, Talley addressed the men's trend in rompers — the short version of the jumpsuit — by telling St. Louis Magazine, "The romper trend isn't something that's universal. I can see Kanye West in a romper, or Drake, in Justin Bieber. Doesn't look going out. Definitely not Leonardo DiCaprio. James Corden can pull off a romper."
Talley's influence reached beyond runways and glossy pages: he appeared in "Sex and the City," the Vogue documentary "The September Issue" and the 2008 big-screen edition of "Valentino: The Last Emperor," which was about the designer. There is a documentary in , He was also the subject of a 2018 documentary, "The Gospel According to André".
“As an international icon over the past five decades, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, was a close confidant of Paloma Picasso and had a penchant for discovering, nurturing and celebrating young designers,” the social media post stated. Reported.
His 11-room Colonial in White Plains, New York, the subject of a legal dispute this year over who has ownership and residence rights, seems to reflect Tally's sense of style, comfortable but opulent. It included a sofa from author Truman Capote's United Nations Plaza apartment.
He has said that, growing up, Vogue's description of Capote's Black and White Ball, a society party supremacist, as a sophisticated world where "bad things never happened" aroused desire and imagination, The New York Times reported in its 2020 wrote in a review of the memoir, "Chiffon Trench."
Talley's memoir was best known for dishes on his tumultuous relationship with another Vogue fashion god, Anna Wintour. But it also brought a new understanding of her own childhood and fascination with the fashion runways — and how race was key to her clothes in America.
His voice was more than a sneeze. He used it to encourage inclusion in an industry that has its racial fanaticism. She was a constant voice of encouragement for the under-recognized over-achievement of black culture, particularly in the field of genre.
Rihanna. Janelle Monae. Kerry Washington. Lupita Nyong'o. When they walked into the Met Gala, which they called the Super Bowl of fashion, he cheered for them like a proud parent. "How beautiful is your dress," he told Washington.
Her sense of appropriateness and pageantry in fashion dates back to her days at church with her grandmother. He often made the distinction that it was not just the Church, but the Black Church.
"In the Black South, the church culture was almost like a finishing school," Tally told Garden & Gun in 2018.
He told the magazine that one of his proudest moments was when Edward Enninful became the first black man to lead British Vogue and told the tally, "You paved the way."
Information about the tally's survivors and services was not immediately available Tuesday night.