“Look Homeward, Angel,” by André Leon Talley, was originally published in the March 2003 issue of Vogue.
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If I tell you I am going to write about luxury, perhaps you will think. André wants to write down what he learned from Diana Vreeland, that self-appointed queen of splendor. Or, André intends to memorialize the heyday of hedonism with the fashion elite. Or, André is about to wax rapturous about the perfect lines of a bespoke shoe. And you wouldn t be entirely wrong.
But they are not what I mean by luxury.
The truth is that I live on a relatively grand scale, because that s the way fashion is: By its very nature, it is larger than life. It s fickle, it s flamboyant, and it s fabulous. But at the same time, it does not provide the boundaries a person needs in order to live a sane, happy life in service not only to oneself but to others. Fashion is no substitute for family, and I do not believe I could ever have learned to appreciate haute couture had I not learned to appreciate simpler things first.
Long before I became Mrs. Vreeland s assistant at the Costume Institute of New York s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long, long before I became the Paris fashion editor at WWD, or Paris bureau chief at W, or creative director (and now, once again, an editor) at Vogue, I was an African-American man raised by his hardworking grandmother in North Carolina.
Growing up, I learned how to live just by watching my grandmother Bennie Frances Davis as she worked, prayed, and went about the business of making a home for me. Her life was not easy, but because it was based on clear, sound principles of good behavior, it lacked the tortured complexity that I now so often see around me. Her code of ethics, always unspoken, was perfectly straightforward: church and family, the focal points, inextricably bound together. She kept a clean, welcoming home, so that those in her care (her own mother and I) could be well provided for, and so that we could all serve God.
What this meant at a practical level was that every surface in our home glowed—not only through the application of soap, paste wax, or ammonia but also through the underlying working of love. What it also meant was that my childhood was, by anyone s standards, a rich one. Faith, hope, charity... add luxury to the list, because it was that important, taken that seriously in our home.
Not the luxury of surfeit and sumptuousness but the luxury of ordinary tasks done well and in a good frame of mind; of simple things suited to their purpose and well cared for.
In 1989, I was 40 years old. Friends were already calling me Mr. Vogue. I loved working at the magazine, and, as its creative director, was on my way to a happy yet totally unpredictable future. But that year turned out to be very difficult, because I lost the two women who were most important to me: my grandmother and my surrogate mother, Diana Vreeland. Both had been ill for some while, and each had fought to the end. Their deaths broke my heart.
My grandmother had worked hard all her life. So had Diana Vreeland. After my grandmother had raised her own four children (having lost two in childbirth), toiled as a maid, and been widowed, she raised me. Five days a week, she cleaned men s dormitory rooms at Duke University. Our house was heavy with love and full of odds and ends, leftover furniture from the dorms that students would give to her at the end of a semester or upon graduation.
Both my grandmother and Diana Vreeland kept immaculate houses—except that Vreeland. who might have three or four maids running around in a frenzy in her small, luxurious apartment in New York, never did the scrubbing, polishing, or cooking. My grandmother not only was responsible for laundry, cooking meals twice a day, and working five days a week, she also was eldest sister to seven siblings and favorite aunt to many nieces and nephews.
Two years prior to her passing, my grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia. She did her best to hide her illness from her loved ones, and I didn t learn of her condition until one Sunday when I rushed home to North Carolina and found her in a wheelchair in the emergency room at Duke University Hospital. She sat there in her robe, surrounded by her favorite nieces. It was only then that I learned that for months she had been going to see a Dr. Cox at an outpatient clinic, where she had taken oral chemotherapy. I spent that long night on a hospital bed adjacent to hers in the emergency ward, watching her sleep and praying for a miracle.
It is no small task to learn to sit back and take it easy after a lifetime of backbreaking labor. With great dignity, both my grandmother and Diana Vreeland refused to let illness limit them. My grandmother never gave in. She went about the business of baking, cooking, and light dusting. Mrs. Vreeland, as I always called her, shut her elegant lacquer-red doors and took to her bed, where I would sit by her side and read aloud as she lay on top of the luxurious covers, impeccably turned out, with her toes and nails in her favorite hell-red varnish.
Mama, as I called her, never wore red varnish. The only time she wore lip rouge was on Sundays for church. Two days before she died, she was still hobbling over with her walker to the red velvet Georgian daybed that I had installed in the bay window of her bedroom, to gently pull the covers up to my chin as I napped on the chaise in my silent vigil. When she turned 90, I threw her a surprise party. She wore a navy-blue Calvin Klein suit and let me pin a huge corsage to her lapel as she stood in front of her tiered cake.
I met Mrs. Vreeland on my very first day working at the Met, in 1974, a few years after earning my master s at Brown University. I d arrived bright and early, wearing a lemon-yellow V-neck lambswool sweater, which Mama had bought me back in high school and of which I was quite fond. I hadn t yet learned about six-ply cashmere. I was also wearing navy-blue alpaca trousers, the sort of pants my grandmother liked me to wear to church. I was as proper as could be.
As soon as I got to the museum, Stella Blum, the Costume Institute s curator, handed me a shoebox, which was strangely heavy, some white cotton gloves to wear while working, and a pair of needle-nose pliers. I took the lid off the box. and inside was an absolute mess of little purplish metal discs. Everything around me grew very still. "What s this?" I asked. "It s the chain-mail dress worn by Miss Lana Turner in The Prodigal."
There was some solace in knowing that the thing was a dress. "What am I to do with it?"
"Fix it. Put it all back together and arrange it on this mannequin." She pointed toward a naked, faceless form, waiting for my handiwork. "Mrs. Vreeland will be here shortly to inspect your work."
The dress was all tangled up on itself, and it took me a good while to lay it out in something approximating its original shape. It turned out to be a Charleston-type fringe skirt harnessed to a bra and bikini. Once I got it laid out, I realized it would be a lot of work to get it to hang right because many of the wires connecting the discs were twisted, broken, or missing after years of sitting in storage. I was also not, as you may have gathered, the most gifted user of tools. The pliers seemed an awfully industrial thing to have to use on a dress. So they sat awkwardly in my hand, and I felt as if they might damage the dress if I tried to employ them. But I did not panic. I thought, I must resolve this problem, because it s been given to me.
After looking at it a while longer, I realized that it wasn t going to take all that much work to make it look the way I wanted it to. After an hour or two, I was both making good progress in my appointed task and pleased with how it was turning out.
Around lunchtime, Mrs. Vreeland sauntered in. This was a woman I had known and loved from afar for years, having read Vogue cover to cover from the age of eight or nine. In that moment, I was somewhat afraid to make her acquaintance, because I knew she would be judging my work, and I had a premonition somehow that my future hung upon her verdict.
I made myself inconspicuous, pretending to do some work behind a column so that I could watch her without being seen. She took very short, staccato steps, on her toes, as she hated the sound of a woman s heels hitting the floor. You could hear a pin drop as she walked with her ballerina gait across the floor. Even on this routine workday, her entrance was regal. She understood pomp. She was a solo pageant. The first thing I noticed was her navy-blue Saint Laurent peacoat; after that I had time to inspect her Mila Schön double-faced jersey pants and scarlet Roger Vivier boots of python glazed and treated to shine like patent leather.
She was so real. Her legendary pelvis-thrust-forward walk, that was real. Her blotter-thin body, real. Her makeup (which she liked to call "Kabuki"), real real real. She was wearing red rouge that glowed under a layer of Vaseline at her temples, and it was smeared to a degree of outlandish exaggeration. Real. She didn t have a greeting or a word for anybody, but as she glided by the mannequin wearing my Lana Turner fringe, she paused and foghorned out. "Who did this?" I couldn t tell if her tone expressed joy or horror. Someone said, "The new volunteer, Mrs. Vreeland."
She continued gliding through the gallery, and I thought, She hates it. Three minutes later, when the empress had arrived at her desk and taken off her coat, an assistant came to tell me that Mrs. Vreeland would see me now. I knew that the summons could mean a host of things, and I hoped it was a favorable one. Something had happened in that Ziegfeld-dancer pass-by, and to this day I m not certain exactly what it was.
When I walked into her office, Mrs. Vreeland was eating her sparrowlike daily lunch: a small shot of Dewar s White Label Scotch and a tiny, tiny finger sandwich sent over from Poll s on Lexington Avenue. "Please be seated," she said crisply to me. I could tell from the look in her eye that she had approved of my attempts.
Mrs. Vreeland took out a yellow legal pad and a sharpened pencil and hunched slightly over them. She was wearing a tiger s tooth on a gold chain. "Now, what is your name, young chap?" she bellowed out, elongating her concave chest. The strength of her voice issuing from her small, thin body reminded me of my grandmother when she used to call me home to dinner. "André," I replied.
She began to write in her large, grandiose longhand. Next to my name—I could read what she was writing upside down, her script was so enormous—she wrote, "The Helper."
"Now," she said, putting the pencil down, "you will stay next to my side night and day. until the show is finished! Let s go, kiddo. Let s go out into the gallery. Get crackin !"
I was astonished at the variety of accessories Mrs. Vreeland possessed—but not particularly surprised by the importance she ascribed to them. My grandmother had cultivated in me a love for the well-turned shoe, the hat that framed the face just so, the deftly chosen detail that made an outfit special. When I was growing up, it was part of our tradition to love fine tilings like the glazed-kidskin gloves and good leather shoes we re- served only for Sundays, along with the special underwear, and my grandmother s lace-up corsets that looked to me. when they lay out airing on the chest, like they d come straight from the Gay Nineties.
I have no idea how Mama amassed such a fine collection of mm gloves, but she did, carefully I budgeting and saving. While I m certain she never gave a I moment s thought to someone as remote as the duchess of Windsor, her habit of never leaving home without an extra pair of gloves stashed in her bag, in case the pair she was wearing got dirty, was a habit she shared with her.
On a trip I took to Paris not long before Mama died. I managed to buy up the last stock of unworn vintage Dior gloves from the fifties to bring home to her. It was in one of those pairs of couture gloves that I buried her; and of course, I tucked a fresh pair inside the coffin, in case the pair she was wearing should become soiled. I gave her a church fan bearing a color image of the Reverend Martin Luther King. Jr., a small tin of her favorite snuff, and a couple of extra handkerchiefs. I selected the hymn "No Tears in Heaven" as part of her going-home services, which were held on a cold March day that I will always carry in my memory. I was glad I buried her with the appropriate accessories, because I knew how proud she would be to enter Heaven with those Christian Dior gloves crushed down to just below her elbows.
My grandmother and Mrs. Vreeland were the most important figures in my life, and their guidance continues to inform my every decision. Although they are physically gone, I feel them with me at every moment, my two good angels, each looking over one of my shoulders. I speak to them both, often, in the silent language of memory-speak.
At the end of the rainbow, I find that the things that are most important to me are not the gossamer and gilt up front of the world I live in now, but my deep Southern roots. The catty anecdotes in which books about fashion abound may be titillating, but they are not what ultimately matters. What matters is a sense of place, a sense of self.
The protection of these two women still guides me as I move through this life. The unconditional love that passed into eternity in 1989 has kept me plowing on, through the roughest waters, with silent whispers of gratitude.
After Mrs. Vreeland s sight became weak, she took to her bed. That was 1986, the same year that she did not show up for an opening-night gala at the Met. The show in question was about Indian costume, whose manner and excess pleased her.
That Sunday evening I escorted Carrie Donovan to the party. It was a wonderful night—another manifestation of Mrs. Vreeland s genius. But as the evening wore on, I began to worry about her. It was unlike Diana Vreeland ever to be late, let alone not to appear at a party whose primary aim was to celebrate her. Her absence cast a pall over the entire affair.
The next morning, as soon as I awoke, I rang up ELdorado 5-2288. The phone was immediately passed over to Mrs. Vreeland by Dolores, her secretary.
"Come up for dinner this evening, André," Mrs. Vreeland said without even saying hello. Her tone was as bright and energetic as ever. "I want to know all about last night."
I didn t dare ask on the phone what had happened, why she had not shown up at her table in her new pink Yves Saint Laurent tunic and skirt. I agreed to dinner and signed off, still wondering. That dreary December evening was the first time I was received by Mrs. Vreeland in bed.
Her explanation was simple. "André, I ve had such a wonderful life, and now I ve decided to take it easy. Look at all the boys I helped down on Seventh Avenue. I have done so much for friends like Oscar, Bill, and Halston. Now I am going to sit back and relax. It s time now to just lie here and enjoy life. Quite simply, I ve had it!" Like Miss Havisham, but without the dust, she took to her room.
When Mrs. Vreeland told me that night of her desire to take it easy after a life of service, I thought at once of my grandmother and me. watching the funeral of Dr. King on our black-and-white TV. When a soloist in that choir began to sing, "If I can help somebody, then my living will not be in vain," Mama had turned to me and said, "That is the motto we have to live by." Mama and Mrs. Vreeland lived a world apart, but with a common purpose: to help others. By helping others, they did not live in vain.
They both walked with abundant dignity, even when they were old. Mrs. Vreeland was as well manicured in her bed as she had ever been at Vogue, and by the time my grandmother retired, I had given her as many Chanel suits, as many Gucci bags as she could ever use. Her best crepe de Chine dresses were made from fabric sent to her by Karl Lagerfeld himself. If she and Mrs. Vreeland had gone walking down Fifth Avenue together, everyone s head would have turned to see those two most elegant, most spectacular women.
After my grandmother died, I inherited her house and most of the things I had associated with her. Mrs. Vreeland, of course, had a family of her own, and after she died it was their decision to dismantle her apartment and to sell off many of her possessions at auction. She had, however, once given me a beautiful jade belt buckle, which I keep on the table in my living room; that reminds me of her. When they held the auction of her estate in 1990, I was in Paris, so I bid on one thing over the phone—a Napoleonic-era scarf that she had framed and hung in her husband s bedroom. I bought that scarf for $700, and now it hangs in my house. But, as with my grandmother, the things Mrs. Vreeland truly left me are things of the spirit: the strength and conviction to move through a sometimes ugly world with a sense of beauty and a modicum of grace; the rare and wonderful sense of having been loved completely for the person I am; and the enduring image of her rapturous and infectious smile.