Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has lived a life

of extraordinary contrasts, full of colour, elegance and excess in public, but disfigured by deep pain and

isolation in private. André Leon Talley is in every sense a larger than life character,

very tall, somewhat overweight,

and usually seen in public sporting and exotic chafdan. For decades, he was the creative director of American Vogue magazine, a close ally of the magazine's driving force and fashion's most

formidable woman, Anna Wintel. He was one of the very few black men at the top of the fashion industry.

It was the culmination of quite a journey from a childhood raised by his grandmother in North

Carolina, subject to racism and traumatic sexual abuse.

Mr. Talley's memoir of his extraordinary life was recently published, it's coincided with America and the world confronting anew the realities of racism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the prominence of the Black Lives Matter campaign. For many years, Mr. Talley avoided the subject which he now puts at the center of his identity. Why?

Well, he joins me now from his home in New York. Andrei Leon Talley, welcome to Hard Talk.

Thank you for having me. You very recently published a memoir, a pretty extraordinary book. It had a very

interesting title, The Chiffon Trenches, which

suggests both elegance and beauty, but also a sense of warfare. Do you feel you've been fighting

some sort of a battle throughout your life? I certainly have. That is an apt description of the

title. It was a title I made up years ago. Before I even wrote the book,

I had made up the title for my first memoir. I didn't use it. I fought a battle, many battles.

I've been in trenches all my life. As an American, African American black man, a descendant of

the enslaved people who were bought to this country 4001 years ago, my daily existence is an uphill battle of survival.

Every black man has to wake up and realize that he is black in a country that promises

him all the equality, equal justice for everyone.

And it's not.

And so therefore, my life is a constant survival in the trenches. I get knocked down, I get up, I get shot down, I get up. Not only in my personal life,

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