“We had nothing but we had everything because we had love.”
Legendary fashion journalist André Leon Talley has passed away. Here’s how he spoke about his first muse: his grandmother, who used to work as a maid for Duke University ... #RIP
Legendary fashion journalist André Leon Talley has passed away. Here’s how he spoke about his first muse: his grandmother, who used to work as a maid for Duke University ... #RIP
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CreativityTranscript
00:00Anyone in this room didn't just pop out of nowhere, you are what you become, it's
00:05what you became from where you came from.
00:16My grandmother, her name was Minnie Francis Davis. I grew up in her house. At
00:22one point we were three people in this house. It was my grandmother and her
00:26mother, my great-grandmother China. This is the most perfect place that I can
00:31ever remember being in as a child. My grandmother was a maid at a university
00:37called Duke University for 50 years. She cleaned dormitory rooms, but on the
00:43weekends we had the most wonderful life built around church. We had nothing but
00:48we had everything because we had love. I had unconditional love for my
00:52grandmother. I learned the core values and I learned style from my grandmother.
00:58Actually, I owe my grandmother a great deal about style. We didn't talk about
01:02style. For me, she was style. When I was very young, my grandmother, one of the
01:07great things she used to do was sit down at night and comb her hair. She had very
01:12beautiful hair and when I was very, very young, the hair was lavender and
01:16sometimes periwinkle blue. So I thought that God had given my grandmother
01:21a special, a special gift. She had, you know, lavender hair and sometimes it was
01:26lavender, sometimes it was periwinkle blue. I never questioned it, I just thought
01:30this is special. Of course, when I grew up, I realized that she was having her hair
01:33blue rinsed at the hairdresser. My grandmother was extraordinary. I
01:37remember as a child that she could get up in the morning, the sun wasn't up. I
01:42saw my grandmother do so many things like a pioneer woman. When I was a
01:46teenager, my grandmother had an extra room and she chose the color pink. It was
01:52Schiaparelli pink. She didn't know it was Schiaparelli pink, nor did I, but she
01:55chose pink and I had this room and I could go in the room and do whatever I
01:58wanted. So I would go in the room and just read Vogue. I think I was reading
02:02Vogue at the age of nine. I probably was not reading it, I was probably just
02:06looking at the photographs, but I can say that Vogue was the thing. I was not
02:11outside playing, I was not shooting hoops, I was not playing football, I was
02:15sitting alone in my special room reading the pages of Vogue. I also would
02:20tear the pages out carefully and take and thumbtack them on the wall. So my
02:24whole special room was wallpapered with nothing but images of Vogue. My favorite
02:28pictures, people, the society people, the fashion shoots and everything. So as I
02:35was in high school, every Sunday I would go across town to Duke University to a
02:41magazine and newspaper stand and buy Vogue. In those days it came out twice a
02:45month and I, little did I think how naive I was I could have subscribed to it, but
02:51one of the joys was going from church across the railroad track to the Duke
02:55campus to buy Vogue and to buy the New York Times and any other magazine I could
03:00get my hand on. So my whole universe and imagination was peopled through the
03:06pages of Vogue. It was an amazing thing because in my family I was the only
03:13child and I lived with my grandmother and she just she never questioned
03:18anything I wanted to do. As long as I was reading, listening to music, looking at
03:24Julia Child, making a chicken, I didn't watch Julia Child and learn how to cook. I
03:29looked at Julia Child because she said bon appetit and I loved the way it sounded.
03:36you