André Leon Talley Gets Real About His Relationship With Anna Wintour
André Leon Talley is going IN on Anna Wintour, y’all.
The fashion icon slammed the Vogue editor in his new memoir, The Chiffon Trenches — out today! — telling Gayle King during a segment for CBS This Morning that “I think my relationship is in an iceberg with her,” adding, “I hope that it will not be that forever.”
Gayle asked him to clarify the contradiction when he’d previously said the book was a “love letter” to Anna.
“I looked at that André and I went, ‘Love letter?’ If that’s your idea of a love letter I’m thinking I don’t want you to like me at all,” Gayle quipped. “How do you explain that? I thought this must be very painful for her to read. Seriously.”
“Indeed, it is probably very hard for her to read,” he replied. “It was painful for me to write this.”
“But it is a love letter because it’s a love letter about the joys as well as the lows of my life. And the joys of my life have been with Anna Wintour,” he explained. “I owe to her the pioneering role that I had of a creative director of Vogue. I was the first black man to ever be named such. I owe that to Anna Wintour. I owe her much. And I think, in turn, I think she owes me.”
“She owes me kindness and simple grace and being decent when things go south,” he further said.
“I understand changes are made in a corporate institution at Vogue,” he said. “When she decides that I’m no longer working on the carpet for the Met Gala, just call me and say ‘André we’re moving in a new direction, you’ve been wonderful, I love what you’re doing, but now we’re going with the young influencers who know nothing because they have 20 million followers on YouTube.’ Just say it to me. No one had come to say to me why I was taken off the red carpet.”
Wow. Well to be honest, we’re totally torn by this. We hope Anna and André can work it out.