From monogrammed luggage to unerring faith, a sale of Talley’s belongings shows the caring, complicated man behind the unforgettable image
who died last year, they might be yours for a guide price of £400. A Chanel navy silk faille opera coat could be snapped up for about £3,000 , while two extra-large Birkin bags look a steal at £4,000. There are no fewer than 29 Louis Vuitton trunks up for grabs , along with a Prada coat in white crocodile and an orange liveried Hermès bike that Talley never rode but kept in storage at the Ritz in Paris.
When Talley died, the gaudy inventory of his possessions and tales of unpaid rent and a painful exile at the hand ofseemed to paint an operatic, bittersweet portrait of an overdressed and overwrought figure. But Talley was a more creative, more interesting, smarter and kinder person than any of that. Having grown up poor and black in the still-segregated US south, he won a full college scholarship and graduated with a master’s degree in French from Brown University.
Proceeds from his estate sale, which are expected to top $1m, will go to two historically black churches close to Talley’s heart: the Abyssinian Baptist church in New York and Mt Sinai Missionary Baptist church in his home town of Durham, North Carolina. The gift reflects Talley’s deep faith and his generosity of spirit, which was not always evident in a lifestyle stamped all over with logos and monograms.
Talley was a complicated, contradictory character. Cathy Horyn, the fashion editor of the New York Times when Talley was in his Vogue era, recalled him last year as “a mixture of southern front-porch grandee … and persnickety Beaton-esque observer”. The grandson of a sharecropper, he was raised by his grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, whose high standards of elegance and aesthetics he credited with sparking his interest in fashion.
By the time he joined Vogue in 1983 and became a semi-public figure as Wintour’s longstanding chief lieutenant, Talley was already a legend within fashion, his encyclopaedic knowledge of fashion history set off to perfection by a glittering backstory of apprenticing for Vreeland and clubbing with Karl Lagerfeld.
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