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Bottom of the pile
19
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
28/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
André Leon Talley
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Date:
May 19, 2020
From the pages of Vogue to the runways of Paris, this deeply revealing memoir by a legendary style icon captures the fashion world from the inside out, in its most glamorous and most cutthroat moments.
What The Reviewers Say
André Leon Talley, or A.L.T. as he is sometimes known, is a man whose life has been largely concerned with appearances, of every kind. His new memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, is a story of someone—and in this he is not unusual in the fashion pantheon—who seems to exist primarily in the reflected glory of others, and in particular of Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour. His raison d’être was bestowed by them. And then removed.
In America, if you are black and aim higher than the reach history has set for you, the white gaze will try to leech your spirit of its racial identity. Very often, it will succeed. Such is the case with the fashion fixture and former Vogue editor at large André Leon Talley, whose memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, is at once a summing-up of his decades-long career and a pointed commentary on how whiteness works.
... recounts half a century of excess in almost every non-essential area of life, which is what makes it such a bitchy and enjoyable read, even if I did need a lie-down afterwards.
Talley believes that Wintour has 'dashed' many people 'on a frayed and tattered heap during her powerful rule”' Somehow, though, he never expected to be a victim himself...What’s strange, of course, is that he could ever have imagined he would be any different. For all his plaintiveness, he seems to have not even the dimmest sense that if you spend your life creeping to those who only respond to toadying, the people involved are probably not very sincere, and your relationship with them is probably not very real.
