Mr. Talley was a fixture at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where, according to the church’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, he arrived with celebrities like Mariah Carey and Tamron Hall but was known for his serious faith.
“With all his celebrity and globe-trotting, he came in the best of times and he showed up in the worst of times,” Mr. Butts said. “He showed up to worship. He supported the church, he gave generously, and his friends loved him.”
Mr. Talley, who was openly gay, lived alone and had little semblance of a romantic life, left no immediate survivors.
Kate Novack, the director of the 2018 documentary, said he was “a classic American success story” but noted that his success “has come at a cost.”
The designer Tom Ford, in that documentary, said, “André is one of the last of those great editors who knows what they are looking at, knows what they are seeing, knows where it came from.” He added, “André tosses out all these different words and he’s so big and so grand, a lot of people think, ‘This guy is crazy,’ but it’s a fabulous insanity.”
André Leon Talley was born on Oct. 16, 1948, in Washington to Alma and William Carroll Talley. From the time he was 2 months old, he was raised by his grandmother Bennie Frances Davis in Durham, N.C., where she worked as a maid at the men’s campus of Duke University.
