Sunday Best: Remembering fashion icon André Leon Talley

A remarkable life in fashion has ended: André Leon Talley, former Vogue editor and creative director and longtime iconic figure in the New York fashion scene, died Tuesday at the age of 73. Known for his dramatic caftans and capes, his larger-than-life presence (literally; he was 6-foot-6), his love of accessories and his keen eye for color and print, Tully grew up Black in segregated Durham, North Carolina — where, as he told the makers of the 2018 documentary “The Gospel According to André Leon Talley,” he read Vogue as a boy at the public library and avidly watched the fashion parade every Sunday at church. Arriving in New York in the 1970s, he quickly became part of the industry he loved: working with Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute and with Anna Wintour at Vogue; advising designers like Oscar de la Renta; helping Michelle Obama with her wardrobe as first lady; serving as a judge on “America’s Next Top Model.” A lifelong student of fashion — his dream dinner party, we learned in the documentary, would include Madame Grès, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent — he was nonetheless often an outsider in a primarily white industry, which he chronicled in his 2020 memoir “The Chiffon Trenches.” But this complex, elegant gentleman’s focus remained clear. “You have to hydrate yourself,” he says in the documentary, “with beauty.”