Teresa’s Book Review: Chiffon Trenches by Andre Leon Talley

The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir by André Leon Talley

Four and 1/2 stars; nonfiction, memoir, the fashion business, tell-all

Although I am not and never have been a snappy dresser, I can appreciate those who make the effort. It is work to look good at all times, rather than going out in public looking like you’ve just come from cleaning out the garage. I also recognize that the world judges us by how we dress: i.e., did you make the effort to clean up nice or is the world going to see you as if all you do is clean out the garage?

I think about this every time I go out in public, especially when I’ve got a book event. I want to represent my brand (Peschel Press) to the best of my ability and I want any attendees to remember me, be interested in me, and most importantly, know who to give the money to if they purchase a book.

Defining my style and selecting the right clothes helps me look my best. Looking more stylish shows I care. I’m not very good at it, but you won’t see me in public in rags or a t-shirt worn thin with age and pockmarked with holes. Despite my limited income and total lack of elegance, I can do better than that.

Then there’s the fashion industry. Make no mistake. It is an industry and one that is worth billions of dollars. All of us are deeply affected by the fashion industry; it determines what we can find on racks at the department store during any given season. Someone made those choices of what to manufacture, hoping to capture the attention of shoppers who need a new blouse.

If you saw the film The Devil Wears Prada (the movie was loads better than the book), there is a great scene where Miranda Priestly educates our young, naïve heroine about color and the magician’s choice she got at the clearance rack. That color, cerulean blue, had been chosen by a designer and then that color worked its way through the fashion food chain until our heroine selected her sweater, thinking she was making a free choice.

Well, she was making a free choice.

But she was only free to choose from the predetermined choices made available to her. She didn’t get to choose candy-apple red because that color wasn’t available for that type of garment at that moment. Colors go in and out of fashion all the time. This is why, if your favorite, most flattering color is currently in fashion, you’d better buy those garments because a year later, you won’t find that color other than at Goodwill.

The fashion industry is loaded with choices like this. I still remember working at Foxmoor Casuals back in the early 1980’s. Remember this long-dead mall chain? It carried trendy togs for young women. We got all kinds of clothes selected for us by the buyers at corporate headquarters. They chose what they thought would sell from what the manufacturers offered them. No matter what us lowly sales clerks thought about what corporate sent to Dover (a small town in a small state), we got what we got and then did our best to sell those clothes to a disapproving public.

Fashion, a billion-dollar industry, is a huge ecosystem and at the very top, are the designers and the magazines that discuss the business of fashion. That’s where André Leon Talley landed in the early 1970’s. He was fresh from Durham, North Carolina (not generally known as a hotbed of elegance) with a scholarship in French studies from Brown and he loved clothes, fashion, history, and Vogue magazine.

Mr. Talley was and is brilliant, supremely well-educated about fashion and its history, hardworking, and has great personal style and a great eye. He’s also very personable, which shines in his memoir. As a fashion journalist, he worked with everyone in the business and does he have stories to tell!

As you would expect, a field dominated by extremely talented egotists has more than its share of fireworks and personality conflicts. There’s also the vision of tsunamis of money sloshing around of the type that ordinary people can’t fathom. I can’t imagine how much money Vogue magazine spent in its heyday, shipping twenty-two people to Europe several times a year for the couture and ready-to-wear shows. All expenses paid, of course, and the staffers didn’t bed down at the youth hostel.

Fresh flowers daily. Porthault sheets (several thousand dollars for a complete set of queen-size bedlinens. I looked it up, gaping in awe.) Custom-made garments with Hermès scarves used for the lining. Cars with drivers. Suites at the Ritz. Private jets. Expensed dry-cleaning and hand laundry. Champagne and caviar and truffles and macaroons. Page after page after page of luxury. Wow. Reading Mr. Talley’s memoir was like peeking into the queen’s palace, when under normal circumstances, I would never get closer than a mile away.

Unless, of course, I was the lucky person scrubbing the toilets in the queen’s palace because none of the people Mr. Talley discusses scrub their own toilets. Maybe they did, when they were poor and working their way to the top, but once they get to the top, someone else scrubs the toilets and dusts the chandeliers. I think a lot about class differences. Mr. Talley’s memoir was a reminder that it’s really good to be the king.

Except when it’s not.

As long as you are desired (and stay young and thin), you’re on top. The second you stop being desired (and put on some weight and get old), you’re out in the cold as if you never existed. Talented Mr. Talley, brilliant and hardworking, had to endure the same ups and downs. The attitude in the fashion industry is always “what have you done for me lately”; not, I am sorry to say “you are a brilliant, hardworking person who made us look better and we’ll always be grateful.”

Mr. Talley mentions that he thinks being African-American worked against him in the industry. I’m quite sure he’s correct. There were probably times when it worked for him, too, as it added to his uniqueness and fashion loves unique. I think, though, that what also sometimes worked against him was plain old boring, mundane human jealousy. When you are brilliant, talented, stylish and hardworking, you make other people look bad. They don’t work hard themselves and they resent anyone who does, showing them up as the slackers they are.

It doesn’t matter how well-mannered you are if someone resents you for breathing. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if someone can’t see past the fact that you’re a scholarship boy (a terrific British term that perfectly encapsulates talented student from the trailer-park trying to mix with his aristocratic betters) with zero family money or connections. It doesn’t matter how hard you work if someone actively looks for the dirt from the trailer-park that you shook off your feet long ago. Thus, despite the rarified air Mr. Talley breathed on a daily basis, he didn’t always sleep in a bed of Porthault sheets embroidered with roses. It wasn’t all glamorous fun, despite what his life looked like when seen in the pages of Vogue.

I devoured The Chiffon Trenches. It was fascinating, reading stories about names I recognize like Diana Vreeland, Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent and more and more and more A-list names after them. The book has a cast of thousands. My gracious, does Mr. Talley have stories to tell. He knows simply everybody who was anybody in the fashion business.

He’s also honest. A great many of these people are, how to put this nicely. Hmm. Aha! Challenging, entitled pains in the ass who shove you under the bus into the slush the second you stop being useful. I’m reminded once again of Lord Acton’s famous statement: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Truer words were never spoken.

The Chiffon Trenches is a great read and if you’re interested at all in the fashion business at any level, it’s well worth your time. So why don’t I award it that all-important last half star?

It needed an index!

Oh my God but this book needs an index. Famous name after famous name and no index to keep track of them all! I have no idea why Ballantine didn’t spend the pittance an indexer would have cost. They knew this book was going to sell like ice cream in August. The Chiffon Trenches is going to be read by fashion historians for decades. It will become a reference work. It needs an index.

The other reason is that it needed more photographs. There are some, both buried in the text and in the color plate section. Even so, considering the amazing clothes and amazing people Mr. Talley discusses, there weren’t enough of them. Again, this will be a book that fashion historians will use for decades. There should have been more photographs. Lots more photographs. Ballantine could have easily doubled the size of The Chiffon Trenches with added photographs. Yes, that would have transformed the book into a coffee-table sized volume but so what? Excess is not always a bad thing.

I don’t mean just fashion photographs of famous people either. Some photographs of his roots in Durham, his grandmother in particular, would have been very nice too, considering how his upraising gave him the strength to manage what can be a very vicious industry.

So there you have it. The Chiffon Trenches is a great, insider’s look inside an industry that affects each of us, every day, whether we notice it or not.

Follow the talented Mr. Talley on Twitter or Instagram.