The following is an exclusive excerpt from “André Leon Talley: Style Is Forever,” available for purchase here. The book’s foreword, as published below, was written by SCAD President Paula Wallace. Reprinted by permission of SCAD University Press and RIzzoli Electa, 2025.

Threads of Everlasting Genius

Late on a Tuesday night in January 2022, I got the call that André Leon Talley — fashion’s truest original, heir to James Baldwin and Alice Walker, a Goliath of intellect and influence with a wondrous heart — was gone. Many know of his legendary, picaresque career with Diana Vreeland at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Andy Warhol at The Factory, Anna Wintour at Vogue, the New York days and Paris nights, turning heads in his caftan and bejeweled turban, his gift for language, his long reign as fashion’s kingmaker, his columns and covers that altered cultural history. For me, André was much more: a treasured friend and ally who profoundly shaped the Savannah College of Art and Design, where we first met a quarter-century ago.

By then, I had been reading his Vogue column for years and invited him in 2001 to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at our annual SCAD fashion show. Knowing André loved spectacle, we greeted him at the airport with a Southern gospel choir singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” “A choir of angels! My jaw is officially on the tarmac!” he said, laughing in that unmistakable voice, earthy and deep and supersonic all at once.

André loved SCAD, and we loved him right back, fusing his creative obsessions and fascinations with a Southern setting that reminded him of home. He once told me that when he welcomed guests to SCAD — he brought dozens of them throughout the years — he always prioritized a pilgrimage to the Candler Oak, one of the region’s oldest living landmarks, growing for 300 years in front of what is now the Deloitte Foundry of SCAD.

“You can feel the voices in the branches,” he mused lovingly, “in the elegant, almost crinoline-like bounce of the branches, the decades, the years.”

He spoke in poetry, even over email, rhythm and color in every syllable. Like his favorite Savannah tree, André’s presence was larger than life, towering and regal and imbued with wisdom and grace.

André befriended everyone at SCAD, including our students, with whom he loved to hold court before runway shows, after film screenings, or in the midst of exhibitions he curated for the university. He shared his breadth of knowledge democratically across majors: fashion, writing, photography, graphic design, accessory design, furniture design, jewelry, art history. He led students on frequent trips across the world for atelier visits with elite designers who hired — and continue to hire — SCAD graduates, and he summoned a train of luminaries to SCAD: Tom Ford, Miuccia Prada, Stephen Burrows, Marc Jacobs, Vera Wang, Ruben and Isabel Toledo, Manolo Blahnik, Oscar de la Renta, Vivienne Westwood, Diane von Furstenberg. They came running at his invitation and found themselves endlessly rejuvenated by our students’ joie de vivre.

André’s boundless enthusiasm for our university led to his longtime service on the SCAD Board of Trustees (2002–2014) and, through his encouragement, to memorable gifts for the SCAD Permanent Collection from so many, including Pat Altschul and Anna Wintour, whose own tribute you can find in these pages. He introduced SCAD to writers like Robin Givhan and Maureen Dowd and to Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation, resulting in generous support for SCAD museums.

We created so many beautiful collaborations together: SCAD exhibitions, books (including Little Black Dress, a perennial favorite), and films like Ovation for Oscar, a documentary tribute to Oscar de la Renta starring André and SCAD students as they prepared an exhibition honoring the designer’s life and legacy — winning Best Fashion Documentary at the London Fashion Film Festival.

Like so many brilliant creatives, André blazed with wonder, curious and open to every new experience. One year during the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, on a halcyon afternoon, André, who, in his later years, found walking difficult, said how perfect it would be to ride a bike around Savannah’s Forsyth Park. An hour later, we’d found him an enormous red tricycle. “Très chic!” he said as he rang the little bell and pedaled around the park, giddy, laughing, happy.

When André set foot near the runway, he was a supernaturally gifted being, missing nothing, his keen eye roving, taking everything in: details he would later remember with remarkable precision from his encyclopedic, photographic memory. In one of his many letters, he confided in me with impish glee and a note of pride: “Oral history is all I have. I never take notes or write journals. I have never taken a notebook to a fashion show!” He evinced this same gift time and again over the years, including at SCAD fashion shows. His astute recall was wizardly. I was fortunate to attend several shows at his invitation over the years: Oscar de la Renta, Marc Jacobs, Chanel, the Dior show at Versailles. In New York, he invited me to one of his “Miu Miu Musings,” a series of parlor discussions right out of Bloomsbury.

My fondest moments with André took place in SCAD’s Magnolia Cottage, where, after long days of studio visits with students, he and I would retreat to watch films until the wee hours. I made truffle popcorn and André chose the films, movies like Tallulah Bankhead’s Lifeboat or Joan Crawford’s The Women. Those evenings together, discussing film, fashion, history, and education, were magical. He was a movie date nonpareil and truly had a teacher’s heart. Once, after a screening of The Gospel According to André at SCAD Atlanta, he held forth onstage for hours, taking selfies with at least a hundred eager students, making each one feel heard and seen.

I sometimes wonder why he chose SCAD as the beneficiary of his love and learning. I think he found here the outward manifestation of all the worlds that lived inside him. SCAD was André’s happy place, the marriage of Southern charm (evoking the best of his childhood in North Carolina) to a design sensibility, cosmopolitan taste, and the everlasting pursuit of wisdom. He rejoiced in the warmth of the South- ern sun and hospitable nature of our community. We were kindred. Family. He often called SCAD his “Zen zone of divine wonder.” And he loved dressing to the nines when he was on campus: custom suits, capes, and turbans. When our Bees remarked with awe and curiosity about his wardrobe, André beamed: “I always bring the jewels out of the vault for my SCAD!”

When I created the André Leon Talley Gallery at the SCAD Museum of Art — a moment of prodigious joy for my dear friend; he cheerfully referred to it as his “wing” of the museum — he made even more visits to campus to collaborate with our curators and teach lessons about the meaning and import of true luxury. (André often said his definition of luxury was “crisp white sheets on the clothesline, blown dry by the breeze and warmed by the sun.”) When I proposed an exhibition of his personal collection of garments and accessories, a veritable encyclopedia of twentieth- and twenty-first-century design, he agreed: “It must be done,” he said. His wardrobe served as fitting armor, his sanctuary, his tabernacle.

So often over the years, countless alumni have written to me about how much André’s presence at SCAD meant to them, including designer Bradley Bowers, who wrote of the courage he drew from experiencing “the magnificent force of nature that he personified.” André, he said, gave others hope “to be themselves fearlessly and unapologetically.”

In 2008, SCAD awarded André an honorary doctorate, and he wore his new title and regalia (in his signature cardinal red) with pride. “If I can help others,” he once said, “then my life will not have been in vain.” This catalogue is a testament to his gift for sharing his brilliance with new generations of designers — Dr. André Leon Talley, a teacher forevermore. He famously did not take notes, but we did (along with many sumptuous images), and here memorialize his manifold gifts and storied life.

André’s plentitude of treasured possessions featured in this book now belong to SCAD students for all time, so that all who visit SCAD museums can step into the wardrobe of fashion’s knightly bon vivant: Charlemagne of the Chiffon Trenches. His life and legacy eternally endure at SCAD, his influence as immortal now as my dear friend’s sensitive soul. A legend for the ages.

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