September 2025 — The Chiffon Trenches, by André Leon Talley

📖 Why this book? 📖

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • FROM THE PAGES OF VOGUE TO THE RUNWAYS OF PARIS, THIS "CAPTIVATING" (TIME) MEMOIR BY A LEGENDARY STYLE ICON CAPTURES THE FASHION WORLD FROM THE INSIDE OUT, IN ITS MOST GLAMOROUS AND MOST CUTTHROAT MOMENTS.

"The Chiffon Trenches honestly and candidly captures fifty sublime years of fash-ion." — Manolo Blahnik

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • FORTUNE • GARDEN & GUN • NEW YORK POST

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💠 What can I expect? 💠

We will meet in-person after hours in Time Tested Books. Front door will be unlocked, and staff will point the way.

💬 We catch up socially for the first 30 minutes,
🧊 at 7pm we do a brief icebreaker in which we mention a book or author we recommend,
📕 and then we start our book discussion.

👜 WHAT DO I BRING? 👜

◾️A snack to share (whatever you like!)
◾️$5 (cash or venmo, details below)
◾️And you could bring your book 😄

✴️ Event Details ✴️

The $5 is split between two things: our access to this Meetup platform and our access to the meeting location.

Meetup has raised its annual fees, and Time Tested Books is keeping the store open after hours for our group. You can venmo me (https://venmo.com/u/Rebecca-Bon) or bring cash.

However❕We would never want you to miss a book club discussion because of the $5, so please message me if you have any concerns

(Heads up: Time-Tested Books can run a bit warm after hot downtown days like these. 😅)

Thanks, and see you all soon!

📚 ** BOOK SUMMARY ** 📚

During André Leon Talley's first magazine job, alongside Andy Warhol at Interview, a fateful meeting with Karl Lagerfeld began a decades-long friendship with the enigmatic, often caustic designer. Propelled into the upper echelons by his knowledge and adoration of fashion, André moved to Paris as bureau chief of John Fairchild's Women's Wear Daily, befriending fashion's most important designers (Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta). But as André made friends, he also made ene-mies. A racially tinged encounter with a member of the house of Yves Saint Laurent sent him back to New York and into the offices of Vogue under Grace Mirabella.

There, he eventually became creative di-rector, developing an unlikely but intimate friendship with Anna Wintour. As she rose to the top of Vogue's masthead, André also ascended, and soon became the most influential man in fashion.

The Chiffon Trenches offers a candid look at the who's who of the last fifty years of fashion. At once ruthless and empathetic, this engaging memoir tells with raw honesty the story of how André not only survived the brutal style landscape but thrived - despite racism, illicit rumors, and all the other challenges of this notoriously cutthroat industry - to become one of the most renowned voices and faces in fashion.

Woven throughout the book are also André's own personal struggles that impacted him over the decades, along with intimate stories of those he turned to for inspiration (Diana Vreeland, Diane von Fürstenberg, Lee Radziwill, to name a few), and of course his Southern roots and faith, which guided him since childhood.

The result is a highly compelling read that captures the essence of a world few of us will ever have real access to, but one that we all want to know oh so much more about.