The normal course of adolescence is to its owner never normal, and at some stage in this interval the array of sensation arrived for André Leon Talley like a guest, or an affliction—and remained with the staying power of a pathology. Experience was general, stimulus was general, and the receipt of each accompanied him into maturity. Each life has its neoteny; to identify its presence in another is to encounter the redacted biography which is the private self, and to possess the means to read it. The cypher which travelled under the name André Leon Talley unscrambles to give a man with a certain stamina for imagination, originating in early esthesis.
His imagism was necessary. Or else it was corollary to the coordination of fastidious temperament with an ardor for appearances that is common to the fashionable. They were to be indulged, for they were in some way nourishing. Style was the nutrient. Stylization such as his accomplished without the assistance of the camera the completion of the pictorial vision; the dandy, which he was not but which was an historical precursor, in his preening and particularity and finally his feel for semblance predicted the photograph by divulging the want (latent though it was, and without a language to speak) for its technology. Now perception had an appliance for its way of seeing; its eventual affiliation with Talley, at Vogue, is one of the great coups of modernity. Here he would effect his mise en scène and secure it in place with the image’s essential stillness and eternity of representation, its function as producer of tableaux vivants.
Fixity, to the photographic ideal which is the natural sight of the dandyish, always equals perfection, or pursues it; a stabilized habitat of just-so affairs and of preordained arrangements conserved against alteration appeals to the fetish of total control overriding the attitude of this type. Talley was the classic case: In him sartorial interest advanced from a thing fundamental to one developmental. At last it took on shocking obsessional dimensions. Tendencies set in, jejune fascination with rituals and taboos of habiliment (usually these were dress-up as the parent and as the other sex) were not outgrown but grown out. In this conception high fashion became a literalism of child’s play: haute couture professionalized juvenilia; the designer studio imitated the infinitely manipulable conditions of the dollhouse. And Talley entered this demimonde as a principal, availed himself of its haven for the geniuses of puerility . . . .
Yet the premature sort cannot endure (this difference separates his from the immature disposition). His condition is one of hypotrophy; as a rule, his time is brief, terminating in fatality. Anathema or antithetical to his sensibility, longevity violates the premise of his arrangement with life, which is never to come fully into being. So the personal facts of the late Talley acquire a hardness of detail which must have been hard on the voluptuary himself. Precocious as an empiricist—in the pure denotation, of a sensorial registrar—Talley had had his triumphs. As clothier he incorporated magniloquence, profusion, extremity into his repertoire. His preference for modes of presentation which were robust corresponded to his own conceptual amplitude, in which manners were judged according to the purity and audacity of their pursuit. To be inclined toward thematic unity in apparel, and to wholeness, to the extension of an optical notion to its logical end conferred to him cast of mind which was expansive, original, philosophic. But the ultimate repletion of his categories was to the fashion system an asset only, tendered—relinquished—much as a dowry.
Much would be annulled. A bachelor in life, in his trade Talley passed his last years as a chronical widower. In his prime the mark of his style upon the culture had been as blatant as a stain, or a signature; like Barthes he knew of fashion that it is “the spectacle human beings grant themselves of their power to make the insignificant signify.” Thus he took the symbolic order for his own, and his achievement was extralinguistic. We came to know him by the characteristic of Negro expression which Zora Neale Hurston called “the will to adorn.” Ornamentation in proportion to ideation, visual fluency, melodrama of gesture, glamour and flagrance were his. Yet he was a Faustus, who must refund what he possess.
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