André Leon Talley, former Vogue creative director, dead at 73

André Leon Talley, the visionary former creative director of Vogue magazine, has died. He was 73.

Talley's literary agent David Vigliano confirmed Talley's death to USA TODAY late Tuesday. Additional details were not immediately available.

Talley began at Vogue in 1983, later serving as the fashion bible's creative director and editor-at-large. The 6-foot-6 fashion icon wrote two memoirs, "A.L.T.: A Memoir" in 2003 and "The Chiffon Trenches" in 2020, served as a judge over four seasons of "America's Next Top Model" and was the center of the 2017 documentary, "The Gospel According to André."

In "The Chiffon Trenches," Talley opened up about how his time in fashion, sexual abuse and race impacted his life, career and friendships.

"I can only write this book based on who I am and where I came from, this very humble beginning in a tobacco town of Durham, North Carolina," the ex-fashion editor told Essence at the time.

Talley was the first Black person to occupy his position at Vogue, and in his 2020 memoir, he described what he saw as his role in shaping Vogue, and, by extension, the fashion industry as a whole.

"I’m not belittling myself to say my strength was in my ability to be beside a small, great, powerful white woman and encourage her vision," he wrote in his memoir of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, according to the New York Times.