The Chiffon Trenches

‘Honestly and candidly captures fifty sublime years of fashion’ Manolo Blahnik


Discover what truly happens behind the scenes in the world of high fashion in this detailed, storied memoir from style icon, bestselling author and former Vogue creative director André Leon Talley.



During André Leon Talley’s first magazine job assisting Andy Warhol at Interview, 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 Women’s Wear Daily, 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 Vogue under Grace Mirabella. There, he developed an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour, and as she rose to the top of Vogue’s masthead, Talley became the most influential man in fashion.


The Chiffon Trenches 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 rumours and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry – to become one of the most legendary voices and faces in fashion.