THE DIARY 09: André Leon Talley - The Things We Keep
A few days ago, Christie’s auctioned around 400 items from the collection of André Leon Talley, the famous Vogue editor at large who passed away in January last year. After stops in Paris and Palm Beach, the items arrived in New York to be exhibited at Christie’s headquarters in Manhattan for a few days during the online sale and before the February 15th live auction.
I visited the exhibition the day it opened, and, as one might have suspected, there were big groups of elegant women, fashion students, collectors, editors, and admirers of Talley walking through the galleries, oohing and aahing in front of the editor’s treasures: crocodile Prada coats in every color; embroidered pillows by Manolo Blahnik; Chanel brooches and Verdura watches; drawings by Antonio Lopez, Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino and Ruben Toledo; photographs by Herb Ritts, Arthur Elgort, Louise Dahl- Wolfe and Deborah Tuberville; a painting of Diana Vreeland on a horse by Andy Warhol; collections of designer sunglasses, ties, scarves and gloves; colorful inscribed collages by Yves Saint Laurent; straw hats made by Lock & Co.; an Hermés bicycle; shoes fit for a king, capes and robes and caftans custom made by Tom Ford, Ralph Pucci, Diane von Furstenberg or Christian Dior; tables, silk screens, tens of books, French lamps, African chairs, toys, handbags, a Chanel tennis racquet, Limoges porcelain dishes with designs by Jean Cocteau, Nigerian masks, a Majolica Jardiniere, Lalique vases, Vera Wang silverware and what it seemed like thousands and thousands of Louis Vuitton trunks, weekender bags and suitcases, some of them with A.L.T monograms and airline tags still attached to them(first/ Talley.) A pair of limited-edition graffiti monogram briefcases by Stephen Sprouse for Vuitton- a gift from Marc Jacobs- sold for almost 70,000 dollars.
Beyond all this bling-bling and logo-glamour, the sale felt unexpectedly personal, intimate and, in many ways, spiritual. The jewels, the bags, the shoes and the robes talked about high style, no doubt, but also about the life of a black, gay man who started his career when literally there was no one like him in the front row of fashion shows in Paris or New York. He grew up in a modest house in Durham, North Carolina, in the Jim Crow era, being cared by his adored grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, who worked as a cleaning lady in Duke University and who, according to Talley, gave him and early “understanding of luxury” dressing up for church on Sunday, keeping up an ordered and impeccably clean house, and imposing in him the value of respect- for himself and for the rest. Binnie was present in the sale in a beautiful portrait by Kim Cole Moore. The other big influence in Talley’s life was the formidable Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who, like him, had an operatic personality and considered fashion almost a religion. There were pictures and photographs of Vreeland all over the galleries in Christie’s, a reminder of the strong relationship she had with him.
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Beginning 27 January, André Leon Talley’s personal collection was offered in a series of sales @christiesinc
The auctions will include iconic items of clothing as well as fine and decorative art, books, jewelry, personal correspondence and mementos. All proceeds will benefit the Abyssinian Baptist Church in the City of New York and the Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, both central institutions in Talley’s life.
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Like bread crumbs in the road, many items auctioned in the sale revealed a privileged but complicated life; the life of a fantastic traveler that carried in his Vuitton and Prada bags deep and complex feelings about race, religion and sexuality. In his last book of memoirs, “The Chiffon Trenches”, Talley painfully remembers discovering that some in the fashion scene would refer to him as “Queen Kong”.
The sale exhibit made me think about the things we carry with us.Why we keep certain things and casually discard others.What has meaning to us. What does not. I have been carrying my collection of Interview Magazines from the 80’s from home to home for decades, as I have done with letters and photographs I received from family and friends before the age of email. My favorite possession is a Slim Aarons portrait of Babe Paley my husband gave me for my 50th birthday. That, and a book of drawings someone gave me after we traveled together in Europe. The last page is a portrait of myself sleeping in the train. These are things that bring up memories and mirror my interests and obsessions, they are a map to my way of thinking and feeling. And, like a perfume, they will keep me in the room after I’m gone.