Former Vogue Creative Director Andre Leon Talley Says His Current Relationship With Anna Wintour is 'Icy'

Andre Leon Talley is opening up about his new memoir, “The Chiffon Trenches”, and calling it a love letter to his former boss, Anna Wintour.

The former creative director for Vogue talked to Gayle King on CBS This Morning about the book and what the current status of his relationship with Anna is.

“I think my relationship is in an iceberg with her,” Andre shared. “I hope that it will not be that forever.”

He explained why it was that way, saying that part of the reason for their strained relationship was how he was taken off the Met Gala red carpet as the digital host.

“I understand changes are made in a corporate institution at Vogue, when she decides that I’m no longer working on the carpet for the Met Gala, just call me and say ‘André we’re moving in a new direction, you’ve been wonderful, I love what you’re doing, but now we’re going with the young influencers who know nothing because they have 20 million followers on YouTube.’ Just say it to me. No one had come to say to me why I was taken off the red carpet,” Andre shared.

He also opened up about why he describes the book as a love letter to Anna, when most people would read it as “a vengeful, bitchy tell-all. It is not. My book is in many ways as a love letter to Anna Wintour.”

“This is a painful thing for me, but it is a love letter because it’s a love letter about the joys as well as the lows of my life,” Andre says. “And the joys of my life have been with Anna Wintour.”

“I owe to her the pioneering role that I had of a creative director of Vogue. I was the first black man to ever be named such. I owe that to Anna Wintour. I owe her much. And I think, in turn, I think she owes me…she owes me kindness and simple grace and being decent when things go south.”

If you don’t know, Andre was replaced by Liza Koshy in 2018 and 2019 as the red carpet host.