'A.L.T.: A MEMOIR' | A review Fashion industry insider pays tribute to mentors

The book includes lively anecdotes of his glamorous life.
By HOLLY HANSON
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"A.L.T.: A Memoir" by Andre Leon Talley (Villard Books, $24.95)
With its outer shell of artifice and glamour, the fashion industry is a ripe target for those who hope to expose its frailties and failings.
Andre Leon Talley, Vogue magazine columnist and a former bureau chief for Women's Wear Daily, would seem to be in the perfect position to deliver a dishy book that would do just that. Perhaps, one day, he will.
But in "A.L.T.: A Memoir" he sets his sights higher. Rather than focus on his 30 years as a fashion observer, he turns his attention to the two women who taught him that surrounding oneself with beauty is a worthy and noble goal.
Without them, his reverent and uplifting book makes clear, he would never have had the courage and the focused ambition to pursue his deep-felt interest in fashion. Though Talley salts the book with lively anecdotes of his glamorous life, the book is less an autobiography than a tribute to his grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, and his mentor, fashion editor Diana Vreeland.
It was their deaths in 1989 that inspired Talley to write about them. His book offers a thoughtful, spiritual twist on the rags-to-riches tales in so many autobiographies today.
Grandmother
Talley was born in Washington but was raised in North Carolina by his grandmother, whom he called Mama, a domestic who cleaned the men's dorms at Duke University.
When Talley went off to graduate school in Providence, R.I., it was wrenching for them both. Most young black men of the day were expected to live out their days at home, surrounded by kin. But Talley was different. He traveled to New York each weekend to soak up the culture of the 1970s. Before he finished his doctorate, he moved to New York. Eventually he was accepted as a volunteer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute.
Vreeland
The institute's director was Diana Vreeland, the former Vogue editor. Vreeland made him her assistant. With her letters of recommendation, he was able to get work as a fashion writer, first at Andy Warhol's Interview magazine.
Though Talley tries to live his life in the spirit of Vreeland and his grandmother, he has had to make allowances. But he follows their guidance in other ways. As they did, he has made it his mission to be giving.
It is a rarefied existence. But as "A.L.T." makes clear, it is the women in his life who helped him reach such heights -- and to them, he will always be grateful.
XHolly Hanson writes for Detroit Free Press.