I used to watch America’s Next Top Model for the last 10-15 minutes where the judges (ALT was one at one point) would analyze the photos and point out amazingly slight differences. I knew these people related to the visual world in a totally different way and a way that was shaping fashion and advertising and thereby all of us to some degree whether we knew it or not.
I also was an avid reader of Vogue in the 90’s and early 2000s when ALT was writing. I remember his articles from then, but never really looked into who he was.
With a similar interest to that in ANTM, I was interested in seeing how he related to the world. Remembering what someone wore 35 years ago is remarkable. His mind is so attuned to the visual and sartorial, it is amazing. This is his life. The heavier topics that would normally fill tortured pages upon pages of a usual memoir are stated and discussed simply. I admit I took some time to warm up to the book, but by the end, I found it fascinating to see the balance between fashion and his personal trials and the way he discussed each. His acceptance of who he is through his negative experiences was surprising since we have come to expect stories of triumph. But his triumph comes through fashion and the fashion world. For me, the telling of the story was as much of the story as the actual events. I think I got the insight I wanted into the mind of a person who broke into a world he was definitely not born into and how he did so successfully.

Fabulous memoir by A.L.T., who gives Conde-Nast some well-deserved raspberries by the end of the book. If you were a fan of Vogue during the 1970s through the 1990s, this book is a must-read.

ALT does a great job telling his story of navigating the fashion industry and his personal life simultaneously. He kinda exposes the messiness of it all. While there was a bit of shade in his story, he recaps his life really well. I’d definitely recommend.

Fabulous and petty and dramatic.

Editing because I read some of the top reviews: Why are you picking up a memoir by a fashion industry insider and complaining that it’s shallow and name-dropy? I read someone say ALT led an “unexamined” life? Truly fuck off. Because I don’t know how you could read this and come away with that attitude. If you don’t know any of these names, you are fashion illiterate and should take some education.

A wonderful autobiography of a wonderfully warm, dignified, intelligent, and observant man who loved beauty and was socially conscious but fun and lighthearted. He suffered immensely and missed out on a lot in life, but he did get to live extraordinarily. The autobiography is also just so well-written and compelling I just inhaled it, listening in his own voice with his unique mix of Southerner and francophile accents

entertaining listen about a world I am glad to know nothing about first-hand

Fascinating! Right up my alley.

I love fashion memoirs, and I especially love memoirs where interesting people speak candidly about the doyennes of 20th-century fashion/art/society. So it goes almost without saying that I loved this memoir. Talley's frank discussion of his experiences as a Black man (and, at times, what seems like the only Black man) at the forefront of fashion journalism in the last fifty years grounds what might otherwise be another fun but flighty fashion memoir. He also speaks candidly of his experiences of sexual abuse as a child, which have reverberated throughout his life.

These more sober elements of Talley's experiences coupled with accounts of his (what seem to an outsider to be) toxic relationships with Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfield made for a tougher, almost sadder read. I expect Talley's memoir will stick with me more than the breezy bon mots of Diana Vreeland's, and I recommend it highly.