Pharrell Williams and More Remember André Leon Talley in Full Splendor at SCAD’s “Style Is Forever”

Diane von Furstenberg recalls her unforgettable first sight of him: “I met André when he came to New York,” she says. “Very, very early on—at the time he was interning for Diana Vreeland. I was in my apartment on Park Avenue having a party, so it must have been 1974 or ’75. He was downstairs taking pictures of people arriving. He was this long, skinny thing; he had on a pink satin cape! That was my first image of him. And then he and I became very, very good friends—especially when he was in Paris.” Although it was love at first sight for Diane—the first of her Black friends and intimates—it was a friendship that endured through the rough times as well as the swellegant ones.

After Vreeland and the heady world of the Costume Institute, André was swept into Andy Warhol’s Factory, through her introduction. He was hired to answer the phone—a mundane task, perhaps, but chez Warhol this meant a conduit to the great and the good. For someone as diligent as André, it was an instant entrée to Jacqueline Onassis, Rudolf Nureyev, Elizabeth Taylor, and Liza Minnelli—the list goes on and on.

From the Factory, André was snapped up by John Fairchild to run the Paris office of Women’s Wear Daily. “To this day, I really give a lot of credit to John Fairchild,” says Diane, “for making him the correspondent of Women’s Wear Daily in Paris. That was a huge, huge deal. Around the same time, Givenchy had all these beautiful Black girls doing the show. I used to stay at the Plaza Athénée before I had an apartment in Paris. André would come visit, and we’d have tea in the hall downstairs, pretending he was an African king. We had a lot of fun! There was that famous Friday night at Maxim’s when you had to wear black tie. He was at a show—Karl Lagerfeld or whatever—and he came to dinner wearing a cashmere robe over a beautiful white shirt and black tie. Just beautiful. So elegant and so divine.”