🎧: The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley for #BookBINGONW2024 “Black Art / Artists.” What a life!!! Some key quotes…On Karl Lagerfeld: “We were friends for 40 years until we weren’t,” On Tom Ford’s friendship: ““I remained fiercely loyal to Tom Ford, who has continued to support me no matter my weight,” On Anna Wintour: “[She] disappointed me in her humanity.” The whole memoir is great. André is mostly forgiving and magnanimous but gets very honest and raw toward the end (I would too if my colleagues and supposed friends set me down for an “intervention” about my weight gain among other social and psychological injustices). What an incredible man and an incredible life lived. I’m so glad I got to learn more about him and the amazing (in every sense of the word) fashion circles he inhabited. Further, his insights on the progress of diversity in fashion were incredibly hopeful while pragmatic. One final note on Karl Lagerfeld: I didn’t think anyone could make me have much sympathy for that man, but André Leon Talley did. CW: weight stigma in the work place, experiences of fatphobia and internalized fatphobia, child abuse. 

Get ready to bone up on your French and your fashion because Talley makes no stops. He's elegant in his prose and magnificent in his years of knowledge.