Andre & Anna: BFF
In light of the incident at the LYCRA Denim Lounge during Spring 2007 fashion week, I’ve reposted this entry I wrote after attending FW for Spring 2006.
Andre Leon Talley is my imaginary VBF (very best friend). In my Pucci printed daydreams, the Vogue editor-at-Large and I stroll, arm in arm, through the Garden State Mall in Paramus, NJ; Andre giving me advice on what shoes to buy during Nordstroms Half Yearly Sale and divulging that Anna Wintour secretly buys her underwear from Target and I showing him how to score a Friends and Family Coupon for Bloomingdales and the amazing restorative powers of a strawberry Orange Julius.
So you can imagine my excitement when I saw my Imaginary VBF on Oprah (another imaginary best friend) last week dishing tips on fashion and dieting. On the show, Andre confirmed what we already knew “Miss Anna (Wintour, the Vogue Editor in Chief) don’t like fat people.” I’m pretty sure that she also doesn’t like poor people, people who ride the subway, people who can’t walk in 4 inch stilettos, Santa Claus, and small children.
Before you start to bash her royal evilness, peep this: Wintour was one of the first embrace the Budget Fashionista concept, featuring a mixture of high and price pieces on the covers of Vogue. In a Feb. 2005 Slate.com article, writer Amanda Fortini states
”She was also among the first to sprinkle inexpensive clothes among high-end fashions: Her much commented-upon debut cover in November 1988 featured a 19-year-old Israeli model in a $50 pair of faded jeans and a $10,000 jewel-encrusted Christian Lacroix T-shirt; another showed a black model in an Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo jacket, a $44 bikini, and a J. Crew bandanna. Wintour’s approach hit a nerve�this was the way real women put clothes together (with the likely exception of wearing multi-thousand-dollar T-shirts). And she also allowed her models to look less than perfectly spackled and coiffed.” She may not like fat people, but she sure likes to sell magazines.
Note: Interestingly, Miss Anna’s thoughts sound eerily familiar to the controversial statement made by rapper and preppy style icon, Kanye West.
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Comments
Have you read “A.L.T.”? It’s not an autobiography in the truest sense, but it’s a nice way to find out Talley’s inspirations. He talks more about Diana Vreeland than Wintour though. Sometimes I wonder if his comment on Oprah was a sly dig at Wintour.
