Perhaps it's a reflection of my own white privilege, but I enjoyed the early part of the book most when ALT (the title of his earlier, undoubtedly more circumspect memoir) describes how Diana Vreeland plucked him, then just a "black American string bean," from a group of volunteers working on what eventually became the Met Gala based on his can-do attitude and resourcefulness. He impressed her with his Ivy League education and his fluency in French and they remained friends until she died in 1989.
Thanks to Ms. Vreeland's glowing recommendations and the connections he made while working at Interview, this regular church-going naif with an encyclopedic knowledge of who wore what when started hanging out with Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev at places like the Anvil, a notorious sex club in the Manhattan's Meat Packing District.
A black man in crotchless leather pants sidled up beside me and I accidentally made eye contact with him. He began making gestures, rubbing his arm, from his elbow to his wrist, and nodding.
“What is he doing with his hands?” I said.
“He is trying to seduce you,” Nureyev said. “He wants you to anally fist him in the back room.”
Wearing matte jersey by Scott Barrie, a necklace made from a metal pipe on a grosgrain ribbon, and my Rive Gauche velvet trousers, when I was told this, I shrieked and ran toward the door.
I feel you ALT, I really, really do. Pre-AIDS New York could be terrifying! But the world of fashion seems just as depraved in some respects. How could a man of your obvious intellect not see through all that kiss-kiss phoniness?
Like a fusillade, I fired off into the uncharted domain of YSL versus Karl Lagerfeld. Somehow I felt at home with these newfound friends. All the principals were gay, something that was understood and never discussed. In this world, there were no victims, only high-octane egos.
The answer, I think, stems from the fact that ALT had a mother who abandoned him and a father who didn't get him. His beloved grandmother raised him by the book, and her nurturing style seems to have rubbed off on him to such an extent that many in the fashionista crowd turned to him juice their high-octane egos with the kind of emotional support that doesn't get you promotions or increase the size of your bank account, although you may acquire closets full of swag and live rent-free on somebody else's property. Until you can't.
You've also got to wonder why he made the mistake of choosing Anna Wintour as a proxy mom. He certainly understands that power makes her tick, yet he repeatedly allows himself to be used as basically nothing more than a dresser. Wintour may have seen their relationship quite differently, but if it's true that she turned to him for comfort after the death of her own mother, then why did he fly to London to be at her side after she had freezed him out for months? A slavish lack of self-respect?
Still, until the epilogue, ALT doesn't completely burn his bridge to Vogue, where Wintour still rules although her kingdom of expense accounts and town cars is much diminished. He bitterly ends the book with this anecdote, published not long after the murder of George Floyd and shortly before his own death at the age of 73:
[Anna Wintour] will never allow anything (or anyone!) to get in the way of her white privilege. When discussing a long list of ideas about my February column one year, she said to me, from behind her desk, “Andre, Vogue is not here to run a column about your ideas on Black History Month."
My takeaway from The Chiffon Trenches: sucking up to people only gets you so far. And gossipy revenge like this only diminishes whatever legacy you might have.
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