André Leon Talley was born October 16, 1949. He is an African American fashion news director/journalist and businessman.

André Leon Talley was born October 16, 1949. He is an African American fashion news director/journalist and businessman. He is the former American editor-at-large of Vogue magazine. Talley has also served as international editor of the Russian fashion magazine Numéro

André Leon Talley was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Alma Ruth Davis and William C. Talley, a taxi driver. His parents left him with his grandmother, Bennie Davis, who was a cleaning lady at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. She raised him and, he claims, gave him an "understanding of luxury." His grandfather was a sharecropper. Talley grew up in the Jim Crow Era South, where the segregation was clear. He recalls “for a long time my grandmother would not allow white people to come into our house. That was her rule. The only white man who ever came into the house was the coroner."

His love for fashion was cultivated at an early age by his grandmother, Bennie, and his discovery of Vogue magazine, which he first found in the local library. Talley was educated at Hillside High School, graduating in 1966, and North Carolina Central University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in French Literature in 1970. He was later received a scholarship to Brown University, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in French Studies in 1973. At Brown, he wrote a thesis on Charles Baudelaire and initially planned to teach French.

In 1974, he worked at Andy Warhol's Factory in New York City and at Warhol’s Interview magazine for $50 a week. That same year he volunteered for Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He went on to work at Women’s Wear Daily and W, from 1975 through 1980. He also worked for the New York Times and other publications before finally landing at Vogue, where he worked as the Fashion News Director from 1983 to 1987 and then as Creative Director from 1988 to 1995. He pushed top designers to have more African American models in their shows. He left Vogue and moved to Paris in 1995 to work for W, and served as contributing editor at Vogue. In 1998, he returned to Vogue as the editor-at-large until his departure in 2013 to pursue another editorial venture. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Savannah College of Art and Design since 1995.

In the mid-2000s, an intervention was initiated by Anna Wintour to get Talley to lose weight. He eventually lost a great deal of weight, and was eating more healthily. In 2007, he was ranked in Out magazine's "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America". Talley has been a front-row regular at fashion shows in New York, Paris, London and Milan for more than 25 years. He uses his influence to promote young fashion designers and mentors young talent in other fields. In 2008, Talley advised the future First Family on fashion, and introduced Michelle Obama to the Taiwanese Canadian designer Jason Wu, from whom she bought, dresses including her inaugural gown. His most famous pairings of late have been with designers Tracy Reese, Rachel Roy, and singer/actress Jennifer Hudson. He is known as a very close friend of Mariah Carey, fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, and tennis star Venus Williams. In 2010, Talley was on the judging panel for America's Next Top Model.

In 2011, the André Leon Talley Gallery opened in the SCAD Museum of Art. From 2013 to 2014, he served as international editor of Numéro Russia, joining the team shortly after the magazine launched in March 2013 but resigned after twelve issues.
He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Savannah College of Art and Design since 1995.

In April 2017, Talley began hosting his own radio show focusing on fashion and pop culture on Radio Andy, a Sirius XM satellite station.

Talley is the subject of a documentary film, The Gospel According to André, directed by Kate Novack, which was screened in September 2016 at the Toronto Film Festival and was released in the US in May 25, 2018. Reviewing the film, Variety magazine said: "The documentary is a deeply loving, frequently beautiful testament to the former Vogue editor, who rose from humble beginnings in North Carolina to become arguably the high fashion world’s first major African-American tastemaker, as well as the type of multi-lingual, Russian-lit-citing public intellectual who is perfectly at ease gossiping on TV with Wendy Williams.

Reference:
Wikimedia Foundation