Elitist fashion industry chewed up André Leon Talley as it does everyone

With André Leon Talley’s passing comes the death, too, of the illusory world of high fashion.

Only Anna Wintour, Talley’s greatest frenemy, is left. When she goes, so goes the demimonde — and good riddance.

As Tom Ford told the Financial Times in 2016: “Fashion is evil.” Ford was once a casualty, but at least he made it out alive, now working on his own terms.

Legendary stylist Isabella Blow, designers Alexander McQueen, L’Wren Scott and Kate Spade — they weren’t so lucky. All died by suicide, Blow and McQueen particularly brutalized by the industry.

When I heard last night that Talley had died, just aged 73, my first thought was his exile from fashion surely contributed. Whatever his medical complications, he also died of a broken heart. Fashion was Talley’s everything. He thought fashion was safe to love. Fashion, he thought, would never leave him.

How wrong he was. “There’ve been some very cruel and racist moments in my life in the world of fashion,” Talley told the New York Times in 2018. “Incidents when people were harmful and mean-spirited and terrifying.”

Yet Talley could play that game, too, buying into this ugly business of beautiful people, reveling in his own role as gatekeeper. He was the outsider who became an insider, as much of a creation as anyone else in that realm: speaking with an indeterminate accent, issuing diktats and commands with the authority of a four-star general, name-dropping and lolling about in a state of unsustainable hedonism.

At some point along the way, Talley couldn’t find the line between camp and crudity.

Take this story from Tim Gunn, who once found Talley in a green room, “a translucent barber’s bib [spread] over André and he’s reclining, arms at his sides. He’s being fed grapes and cubes of cheese one by one, like a bird in a nest.”

To cite a maxim Gunn helped popularize: One day you’re in . . .

Still, it was bracing to read dispatches from Talley in exile, no longer in Anna Wintour’s favor, cast out, he said, for being “too old, too overweight, too uncool.”

By 2018 he was living alone in White Plains, broke and facing eviction, dropped by nearly all his fancy friends, shocked at how reptilian and transactional that world was.

But Talley, whether he knew it or not, was also mourning something that no longer existed, a kingdom long ago democratized by technology, fast fashion, reality shows and TikTok influencers.

Talley’s final indignation was learning, a few years ago, that he’d been fired as Vogue’s official red-carpet Met Gala interviewer, replaced by a 20-something YouTube star.

That’s who has the currency: Not Vogue, not Wintour, but any kid with a ring-light and a following.

“Fashion does not take care of its people,” Talley said in 2018. He hoped to avoid the fate of one-time YSL muse Loulou de la Falaise, who died broke and abandoned by the industry.

“I am very afraid of that,” he said.

He was right to be. Fashion has lost a true original, and for better or worse, we will never see his like again.