André Leon Talley spoke about his 30-year friendship with Anna Wintour during an interview with Gayle King for “CBS This Morning” on Monday.
The 70-year-old, who first began working with Vogue back in 1983, told King of his relationship with Wintour: “I think my relationship is in an iceberg with her. I hope that it will not be that forever.”
King questioned why Talley had called his new memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, a “love letter” to Wintour, when he said in it she is “not capable of simple human kindness.”
The presenter asked, “How do you explain that? I thought this must be very painful for her to read. Seriously,” to which Talley replied: “Indeed, it is probably very painful for her to read. It was painful for me to write this.”
He insisted he sent Wintour the final proof of his book before its publication and made sure to take anything out that she wasn’t happy with, including bits about her family.
“She called me, she complimented me, she said, ‘Thank you for saying very nice things about me. I don’t want certain pages in the book,’ and I removed them instantly,” Talley shared.
“And so this is a painful thing for me, 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. 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.”
As King asked what Wintour owed him, the former American Vogue editor-at-large said, “She owes me kindness and simple grace and being decent when things go south.”
“I understand changes are made in a corporate institution at Vogue, 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 to 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.”
Talley was replaced as the Met Gala red carpet host in 2018 by YouTuber Liza Koshy.
