One Front-Row Seat at the André Leon Talley Auction, Please

André Leon Talley modified how the world seems to be. Because the one-time inventive director of Vogue, the mentee of Diana Vreeland, and the very definition of a public style editor, Talley’s persona and fervent love for style solidified his place within the canon of tradition. (Popular culture too—on the flip of the 2010s, he served as a choose on America’s Subsequent Prime Mannequin.) Usually the one Black editor within the room—a 1994 New Yorker profile referred to him as “the one one”—he urged the business to alter its lily-white picture, although his efforts to make use of the fantasy of style to nudge that imaginative and prescient into actuality weren’t at all times fruitful. However as a strolling encyclopedia of style’s traditions, and a dwelling commercial for the business’s transformative promise, Talley proved {that a} Black man from humble origins, and a loud homosexual man who dressed like one, might make the world pay attention. When he died in 2022, his absence felt seismic. 

On January 27, Christie’s will launch a collection of dwell and on-line auctions of The Assortment of André Leon Talley after a number of the choices excursions Palm Seashore and Paris. There are, after all, Talley’s signature capes and caftans, together with a unprecedented gold brocade quantity by Dapper Dan. (A few years in the past I labored as a researcher at Vogue, and whereas fact-checking one among Talley’s Paris dispatches, he confirmed me simply how a caftan ought to relaxation upon the shoulders. “It should drape,” he advised me, adjusting a midnight blue confection round his body. “In any other case it’s curtains for the poor factor!”) 

Talley lived flamboyantly. His home, the story goes, had 4 bedrooms, and three of them had been used as closets. In 2017 he advised The New York Instances that he solely used 2 of his house’s 11 rooms. “I don’t have issues as a result of they’re of a sure high quality,” he mentioned. “It’s simply because I like them as lovely objects. I’m attempting to do an eclectic mixture of references and influences.” These influences, in typical type, had been discovered and beautiful; as he advised AD in 2014, “My robust level is that I discovered from the most effective: Marella Agnelli, Sister Parish, and Henri Samuel!”

And so the artwork and decor Talley gathered to make his home a house are of explicit curiosity. A 1984 Andy Warhol portrait of Diana Vreeland as Napoleon is, properly, absurd; Talley’s portrait by his longtime frenemy Karl Lagerfield, which casts him as “La Tsarina on her method again to the Winter Palace,” is way more emotionally and politically ambivalent. Each pale by way of efficient portraiture subsequent to the lot’s set of three 1990 Louis Vuitton hard-sided suitcases. Every is painted with yellow, purple, and black letters: ALT. There he was, wherever he went.

By way of furnishings, quite a lot of two pairs of Baccarat luster candlesticks, one among parcel-gilt and the opposite with a base of leaping dolphins, is the peak of too-much-ness, sparking visions of Talley exchanging sizzling gossip amongst their fiery flickering. A group of glassware may inform the sophisticated story of the design relationship between Europe and Africa: The Hermès drink-ware set, comprising opaque white and translucent cobalt pitchers and glasses for highballs, old-fashioneds, and water, is a high-style tackle Tunisian craft; the accompanying quartet of Dior translucent inexperienced glasses provide what is likely to be Saharan landscapes, full with giraffes and different creatures. Did Talley see these as testaments to African magnificence? Intercultural aesthetic trade? Colonial kitsch? If solely he had been round to argue over drinks.