During an appearance on The Tamron Hall Show, André Leon Talley revealed he experienced wage discrimination when he worked at Vogue Magazine.
Talley told Hall he discovered he had been shafted about two weeks ago. During his 30-year tenure at Vogue Magazine, Talley was a fashion news editor, creative director and most recently– the editor-at-large. He left in 2013 and released his memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches,” last year.
“I just found out two weeks ago from someone of authority that women at Vogue, high, high-rate fashion editors made close to a million dollars. I never made that much in a year,” Talley told Hall, who he considers a friend. “I made almost $300,000, but people on the same level, maybe they were doing more work than the fashion photoshoots, were making $900,000 a year.”
He described the revelation as another example of what it means to be a Black person in America.
“They don’t make that anymore; but this is this is what comes when you live in America. When you’re a Black person, you have to wake up, and you go, ‘that’s a double standard,’” he continued.
This is an interesting comment from a man who has a reputation for not paying it forward. Talley has been criticized for not doing enough to mentor Black people in the fashion industry. A year ago, former Vanity Fair writer George Wayne told Page Six Talley “never helped me.”
“He never sent me a note or offered anything, but I understand … He never mentored any of the black kids at Condé,” he told the publication in May 2020. “I hate to talk in black and white, but facts are facts.”
After his appearance on The Tamron Hall Show, social media brought up his questionable past.
https://twitter.com/DennisMaurice/status/1390192734942732289?s=20
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“He was trying to keep up with people who have generational wealth and large salaries. He’s a damn fool and establishment tool. Another Ivy League negroes who thought they had made it to be in the room with yt folks who laugh behind your back,” wrote one critic.
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“Not sure how bad I feel for Andre Leon Talley. He went right along with being the token, so what does he want from us?” another person tweeted.
https://twitter.com/Connichameleon2/status/1389641723345788933?s=20
Talley’s stance on mentorship is basically bootstrap terminology in a tacky kaftan.
“You pull yourself up first,” he told journalist Tre’vell Anderson last year. “You don’t have to be pulled up. I was pulled up by myself, and people recognized me… and to those naysayers who say I didn’t do enough, I did a lot in my own way.”
Talley also claimed he did not have the power to help other Black people– as he established his career.
“When I got my foot in the door in 1975 with Andy Warhol, there was no way that I was going to be able to maintain my position in their world by bringing behind me a pied-piper group of talented young Black people,” he explained to Anderson. “Blackness must also be aligned with Whiteness in order to succeed, because we live in a White society, a society of White redundancy.”
The last time Talley was in the headlines, he fought with his former friends George Malkemus and Anthony Yurgaitis over a rental agreement and facing eviction from his home, The New York Times reported. Malkemus is the former CEO of Manolo Blahnik USA and Yurgaitis is his partner in life and business.
Alignments can’t cancel out Blackness, dahling.
