The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir of a Life's Journey Through Fashion

kioki watanabe: I really enjoyed reading this book. It confirmed his brilliance--and it also the dark side of the fashion world--we all know it's a messy environment with stuck-up people....but Andrea---nice guy.

United States on Jul 25, 2023

Cyprian DeCoteau: Incisive! Poignant! Lyrical!

United Kingdom on Jul 13, 2023

lys: A beautiful reading of a lovely man with the utmost refined taste and Southern manners. His Grandmother would be proud. Most enjoyable!

United States on Jun 18, 2023

MS MAUREEN ETTIENNE: Heart warming great story telling .
whole human experience.
Being black in fashion is hard.

United Kingdom on Mar 16, 2023

Glenn JonesGlenn Jones: It’s was such a wonderful read, zipped right through it. Andre was a wonderful person with great stories to tell. Andre seemed very true and honest in his writing.

Canada on Feb 07, 2023

Della Mac: I have always been captivated by fashion, love the magazines, love the fashion shows, love fashion!!! I have subscribed to nearly every fashion magazine you could think of and have been mesmerized by Ms. Wintour and her eclectic collection of the very best minds in fashion, but I had no idea that many of the best in fashion had actually found her. Mr. Andre Leon Talley is an amazing individual, who was not only born with the ever-elusive genetic gene for impeccable fashion, but for taste as well. I never realized he was not only a fashion giant, but such an intelligent and sensitive individual as well. Imagine a small child growing up in the Jim Crow south, moving on in life to attain a scholarship to Brown University, securing a graduate degree in French Literature and then going to New York to land an internship under the iconic Diana Vreeland! I thought that only happened in movies, but being who he is, both artistically and intellectually, how could it not have happened? It was his destiny. He takes us on this journey with him and tells us everything, describes all the wonderful places he has been, all the interesting people he has known and even describes the luscious fashion...

United States on Oct 09, 2020

brooke101: Not one word about Tyra Banks, yet there are pages and pages, literally pages, of praise for Naomi Campbell and the entire book is filled with every name-drop possible. But Andre Leon Talley literally omits ANY mention of his work on four seasons on ANTM, his relationship with Tyra Banks, or even acknowledges any of her successes. Such a disappointment to read a memoir by someone you know is so influential behind the scenes, wanting to learn more, and they pick and choose what they want to recount. Because of that, this book started to fall flat for me by the end when it started off so interesting and is so beautifully written throughout. He uses such descriptive language, mixed in with the right amount of impeccable French to put his elegance and sophistication right into the book. However, once I learned Tyra wasn’t coming to the party, it was about two thirds of the way through when I realized those years were completely omitted, I was ready to leave. I feel like if he can omit such monumental events, especially because I bet a lot of millennials and the new generation first learned about him from watching ANTM, it makes me wonder what else was omitted. Events, details,...

Canada on Sep 29, 2020

MiaMia: Yet to go through but already excited!!

India on Sep 24, 2020

miznic: I've always viewed Andre Leon Talley as larger than life, an icon of the fashion world, just by his association with Vogue (though, to be honest, I didn't know he was a part of Vogue, since I'd first seen him in Vanity Fair, in the 90s). I'm glad I didn't read his previous autobiography (ALT) first; I would have been sorely disappointed. This book is what I was looking for from him - I wanted his perspective on the fashion world and I wanted to know how he became a part of it.

ALT is very descriptive about the fashions of the time period he speaks of; you can't help but follow along with him in your imagination. He is equally descriptive about his relationships with Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Diana Vreeland, Lee Radziwill, Naomi Campbell, and countless other Boldfaced Names in Fashion. I appreciated his honest appraisal of talents like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Tom Ford; especially Galliano, who would have been one heck of a tour de force in fashion, if his outburst hadn't waylaid him. I loved reading about his honest struggles with his weight and his mother; as someone with a fractured relationship with my father before he died, I could relate. Also - I live...

United States on Jun 14, 2020

Cognorati: I have been following ALT since his days writing the "Style Faxer" column for Vogue, in the 1980s. I was never into fashion and didn't really care about the content. It was just that I was completely staggered by his predicament as a gay Black men in the upper echelons of the fashion world. At a time when there weren't even Black people on television, I secretly hoped he would share insight as to what it was actually like to be him -- what life was like, for him.

The book does this is an unusually hypnotic way. Many have criticized ALT's lack of introspection and the lack of overt criticism of the fashion world and race. Those readers have failed to realize that the extremely marginalized and precarious position he held as a gay, Black man from the American South who didn't have a financial parachute -- unlike most in fashion with wealthy or aristocratic lineages -- created his tendency to circumspection and caution; depth and introspection are also not the domains of the fashion world, while insincerity and disposeability are (consider his relationships with Wintour and Lagerfeld). What ALT achieved for decades is statistically anomalous and there really isn't anyone who...

United States on Jun 12, 2020