By: EFE Updated 19 Jan 2022, 2: 08 am EST
André Leon Talley, the former editor of the American edition of “Vogue” and fashion legend international, died this Tuesday at 73 years old, reported the celebrity news outlet TMZ.
According to TMZ, which cites a source with direct knowledge of what happened, Talley died Tuesday at a hospital in White Plains (New York) of causes that are still unknown.
During her career, Talley wrote for a large number of publications such as “Women’s Wear Daily”, “W” and even for “The New York Times”, but his work in the American edition of “Vogue” brought him to fame.
He was the magazine’s chief information officer, its creative director and one of its main editors, which led him to work closely with Anna Wintour, the chief editor of Vogue USA.
Born in 1948 in the US capital, Talley broke the mold of the time and became the most powerful African-American in the world of fashion.
He grew up with his grandmother in North Carolina at a time when racial segregation marked the life of the in the southern US and, at just nine or ten years old, she showed an interest in fashion by reading “Vogue” magazines at the local library and watching how African-American women dressed for church on Sundays.
He studied French literature at Brown University (Rhode Island) and, in 1974, was discovered by the then publisher of the American version of “Vogue”, Diana Vreeland, who got him a job in the legendary New York studio “Factory” of the eccentric Andy Warhol.
Since then, Talley immersed himself in fashion to end up becoming one of the most high-profile African-Americans in the sector.
With an explosive personality and almost two meters tall, Talley was in the first row of the most prestigious fashion shows tigiosos of New York, Paris, London and Milan for almost three decades.
During all that time, he defended the need for greater racial diversity not only on catwalks with models, but also among designers, executives and magazine editors.