My guest on The Green Dream today is the legendary former Vogue editor André Leon Talley, and no, he is not speaking to us from the grave, though if anyone could, and would, it would be André!
André and I met for our interview at the Mona Bismarck American Center in Paris, where he was overseeing the installation of "Little Black Dress”. This week, a year after his death at 73 from Covid-19, a large swath of his estate is up for auction at Christie's in New York, to benefit two of his favorite places of worship, the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and the Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, where he grew up.
The Christie's auction is how this interview fits into The Green Dream remit: if you buy well, and, boy, did André buy well (and was gifted very well too), your belongings can have a good long life after you are gone – be it heirlooms for friends and family, or estate sales open to the public. As I say often in my British Vogue sustainability column, in interviews, and in conference speeches, the most sustainable thing you can do is buy less, buy better. We’ve even turned into a hashtag: #buylessbuybetter.
