The Chiffon Trenches

During André Leon Talley's first magazine job assisting Andy Warhol at, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship and propelled Talley into the upper echelons by virtue of his shared knowledge and adoration of fashion. He moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's, befriending fashion's most important designers. But as Talley made friends, he also made enemies. A fraught encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of under Grace Mirabella. There, he developed an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour, and as she rose to the top of 's masthead, Talley became the most influential man in fashion. is a candid look at the who's who of the last fifty years of fashion, and proof that fact is always fascinatingly more devilish than fiction. André Leon Talley's engaging memoir tells the story of how he not only survived but thrived—despite racism, illicit rumors and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry—to become one of the most legendary voices and faces in fashion.