“Prada” left me as hungry as a model after a lettuce-leaf lunch, so I turned from Andrea to Andre–Leon Talley, that is, the real-life Vogue editor at large who’s just published his memoir, A.L.T. Talley is a 6-foot-7 African-American who grew up poor in North Carolina, dreaming of the glamorous world of fashion. His book is really a valentine to the two women who boosted him to his goal–the grandmother who raised him and his legendary mentor, Diana Vreeland. Both had style and, Talley argues, money can’t buy that. His grandmother, a cleaning lady, was always beautifully dressed for church, right down to her immaculate Kislav gloves. His slender book tends to be repetitious, and he mostly avoids the big picture (like the civil-rights movement of his youth). It’s also short on gossip from his go-go years in the ’70s and ’80s in Paris and New York. But there’s a genuine sweetness here: when Vreeland was going blind, he’d read aloud to her in her famously red apartment, each sipping vodka. Like “Prada,” “A.L.T.” springs from a frivolous world, but it’s filled with real feeling, which never goes out of fashion.
