Courtesy Christie's.
Works of art and design from the estate of André Leon Talley, former creative director of Vogue, are going to sale at Christie’s. Talley, who died at the age of 73 in 2021, was known for a breaking ground in the fashion world despite being marginalized by industry peers.
Now, designer wares, including wardrobe trunks, robes, and sunglasses from designer labels like Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, will be put up for sale next month by the legal executors of Talley’s estate. Talley’s links to figures spanning art, publishing, and fashion can be seen throughout the near 400-lot selection. (A group of items from the estate will go the Savannah College of Art and Design, where Talley served as a board member.)
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The sale is expected to fetch a collective $1 million when it is held on February 15 in New York. Proceeds from the sale will support two historically Black churches.
Three silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol, each priced between $15,000 and $20,000, will be auctioned. One of them includes an image of Diana Vreeland, Talley’s mentor and the former Costume Institute director at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vreeland appears as the recurring subject of several other lots in the sale, including a 1979 photograph by Horst P. Horst that depicts the fashion editor reclined in a couch that matches the maximalist red décor in her Manhattan home dubbed the “garden of hell.”
Another photograph depicting the young Talley, seated with Warhol and Bianca Jagger at a dinner in 1981 is attributed to Bob Collacello, a former Interview editor. Also offered in the sale will be two wheeled yellow magazine cases emblazoned in black cursive with the phrase Andy Warhol’s Interviewcommemorating the publication’s first decade in print.
Artworks and costume designs by fashion’s historic names appear elsewhere in the sale. Alongside the Warhols are three tricolor collages of silhouetted busts made by Yves Saint Laurent, a Vivienne Westwood robe, and sketches by Karl Lagerfeld. The latter was named this week as the subject of the Costume Institute’s annual gala.
