“I felt good about Charlotte and I felt good about the upcoming film.” Talley, too, was proud-“I was proud to be in my state.” Though he grew up in Durham, just 142 miles away, he had never been to Charlotte until he spent weeks at work on the show, but he came away “impressed” with the city’s “beauty and Southern grace” as well as the “refined” gala with its “off the charts” Southern food and “extraordinary” flowers. Talley arriving at Christie’s East for a benefit in the late 1970s. ![]() Photo: Dustin Pittman/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock (6909156j) This particular moment was especially significant because it marked a meeting of Talley’s two worlds: North Carolina, where he was raised by Bennie Frances Davis, the beloved grandmother he called Mama, during the dark days of the Jim Crow–era South, and what he refers to as the Chiffon Trenches, the rarefied world of high fashion where he has toiled for more than forty years as an editor, curator, commentator, and behind-the-scenes adviser and muse to countless designers, including de la Renta. ![]() The event, a fund-raiser cochaired and envisioned by Laura Vinroot Poole, owner of the fashion-forward Charlotte boutique Capitol, also made the almost infinite list of what Talley is prone to call “moments,” intensified occasions invested with special excitement or emotion that could range from, say, the sight of me in the lettuce-green Scalamandré silk Carolina Herrera wedding dress he all but designed (“It was a moment, I tell you, a moment”) to the deep, deep pride he felt when he dressed and profiled Michelle Obama for Vogue (“I only wish my grandmother had been alive to see it”). André Leon Talley, the towering (he is six foot six) former Vogue editor who was a close friend of the late designer’s and the curator of the exhibit, sat slightly apart from the crowd, bedecked in a stately Tom Ford cape made of black silk faille-“like those,” he informs me, “of the bishops and cardinals.” From his roost on a garden bench (where he was joined by Yvonne Cormier, a Houston anesthesiologist and philanthropist who has been one of Talley’s close friends since their days at Brown University), he chatted with the likes of actress January Jones and gallery owner Chandra Johnson (who is married to NASCAR mega-champ Jimmie Johnson) as a growing group of fans circled tentatively in hopes of an encounter with the great man, who graciously obliged: “And what is your name?…Of course, you can take a picture… So nice to meet you… love the dress.” ![]() To the museum’s dazzling show The Glamour and Romance of Oscar de la Renta, which opened the next day. On a clear and lovely Saturday evening last April in Charlotte, North Carolina, more than 450 guests gathered on the lawn of the city’s Mint Museum for its annual gala, a black-tie shindig called Coveted Couture, a reference
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