AndréAndré Leon Talley - A Fabulously Fashionable Fairy Tale
Review posted December 30, 2025.
Little, Brown and Company, 2025. 36 pages.
Review written November 18, 2025, from my own copy, sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review
I'm not even a little bit interested in high fashion, but this picture book biography got me very interested in a Black boy who was, and who grew up to be editor of Vogue magazine.
André Leon Talley grew up in the Jim Crow south, finding escape from bullying by reading Vogue magazine. His growing up years weren't easy:
At Hillside High School, where French was his favorite subject, six-foot-six André stood out. His voice, his mannerisms, and his smarts rubbed some bullies the wrong way. They beat him up because of how he looked and who he was.
But a little before the halfway point, we get a spread of André's plane landing in Paris, and the rest of the book is about his progressive success as a fashion journalist in Paris, beginning as an assistant to Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue, and progressing to where he was the editor of Vogue himself and giving fashion advice to Michelle and Barack Obama in the White House.
The joyful pictures make this book special. In every spread, André stands tall above others, and we see his sense of style progress - from a teen dressed more meticulously than his peers to the flowing caftan style he proudly wore as an adult after a visit to Morocco.
I wasn't too happy with the back matter - I would have liked a timeline to at least know when he was born and died, so I turned to Wikipedia. (1948 to 2022. I also found out his years as editor of Vogue were 1998 to 2013.) But I suppose it's not a bad thing that this picture book biography made me want to find out more.
And this is another one I encourage you to check out for yourself. André described his own life as a fairy tale, and his joy in that journey shines through these pages.