Preceded by a sequence of previews in Palm Seaside, Paris and New York — the final of which included a efficiency by the Abyssinian Baptist Church choir — the property public sale of the legendary trend editor André Leon Talley was a full-blown cultural occasion. The stay motion fetched $1.4 million, however followers world wide can proceed to feast their eyes on his dazzling assortment of high fashion, high-end furnishings, artwork and different luxurious gadgets, lots of them personalised or custom-made to suit Mr. Talley’s substantial body and colossal persona.
Mr. Talley’s public sale got here only a few months after the worldly possessions of Joan Didion went to gavel at Stair Galleries in Hudson, N.Y. — an occasion that generated astonishingly excessive bids (a pair of Celine sun shades: $27,000) and much more curiosity from those that admired her essays, her novels, her screenplays or her capability to dangle a cigarette with panache and gravitas. In October the private results of Elizabeth Wurtzel, the creator of “Prozac Nation” had been bought on-line, giving those that as soon as paged by means of her provocative memoir of intercourse, medicine and psychopharmacology the possibility as an alternative to click on by means of photos of her purses and half-used fragrance bottles.
The archetype for occasions of this sort certainly needs to be the Camelot public sale, the sale of the property of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1996. At present, when movie star is so completely commodified and Donald Trump is hawking digital superhero buying and selling playing cards, it’s laborious to recall how nearly comically outré it was to see John F. Kennedy’s golf golf equipment and John-John’s excessive chair getting hauled out on the world’s entrance garden. However it was a smashing success, with costs that exceeded all estimates, and extra adopted. Whether or not it was Audrey Hepburn’s public sale in 2017 or Zsa Zsa Gabor’s in 2018, these gross sales provided one thing extra than simply the memorabilia: fame, energy, cash and wonder rolled into one shiny triumphalist bundle, a fantasy that belonged to everybody however could be bought to the best bidder.
Mr. Talley’s possessions had been a testomony to his gilded style and his much more gilded connections: scattered among the many Dior brooches and ormolu candlesticks had been portraits of him by the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Gianni Versace and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis; mementos of Diana Vreeland and Naomi Campbell; a valentine from Andy Warhol; Louis XV-style console tables; a whole set of personalised Louis Vuitton baggage; and, after all, so many bespoke caftans.
The objects informed a exceptional story of self-creation by somebody who was born into modest circumstances within the segregated South. As a baby, he pored over Vogue in a Durham, N.C., public library, and he has described the way in which it served as a portal right into a glittering world of not solely trend but additionally artwork, literature and exquisite issues of each selection. Many years later, he emerged as a number one determine at that journal, writing breezy, waggish dispatches from the style world — which I, in flip, pored over in my very own teenage years. I couldn’t say precisely why his columns appealed to me a lot, however I felt in his writing the centripetal pull towards some kind of transcendent aesthetic future during which every thing was excellent.
Ms. Didion, Mr. Talley and Ms. Wurtzel had been all pursuing their very own fantasies once they got here to New York. For all three, a job at {a magazine} was step one on the trail to fame. And for all three, model — literary, sartorial, you title it — was an enormous a part of their id. “Model is character,” Ms. Didion famously mentioned. Ms. Wurtzel wrote that she at all times believed within the maxim, first attributed to Dorothy Parker (one other Vogue alumna), that “if I took care of the luxuries, the requirements would care for themselves.” “I at all times reply to trend in an emotional approach,” Mr. Talley mentioned.
Mr. Talley achieved every thing that that child within the Durham public library might have dreamed of. However the final chapter of his life was much less glamorous. After a extremely publicized fallout with Vogue’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, he underwent a dramatic downshift. Leaving Manhattan for the suburbs, he lived in and made funds in the direction of a home owned by a former trend connection, then confronted eviction when their relationship soured.
Ms. Didion remained glamorous till the top, featured on the age of 80 in an promoting marketing campaign for Celine, however her later years had been outlined by tragedy; the lack of her husband after which, shortly after, her daughter sank her into grief so deep that she crammed two best-selling and award-winning memoirs, “The Yr of Magical Pondering” and “Blue Nights.” Ms. Wurtzel’s final years had been marked by new horizons — as a graduate of Yale Legislation College and, for just a few years, a lawyer at Boies Schiller Flexner — but additionally by well being troubles. She died of breast most cancers at 52.
Although Mr. Talley, Ms. Didion and Ms. Wurtzel had been all public figures, they acquired there largely by arranging phrases on a web page, a course of that withholds as a lot because it shares. Their legions of followers may need thought — as followers do — that they knew these figures, nevertheless it was solely an phantasm, rigorously constructed by folks whose personal lives remained, ultimately, personal.
Mr. Talley’s public sale, hosted by Christie’s, was exquisitely curated and offered. Ms. Didion’s was additionally superbly offered and succeeded in elevating almost $2 million for medical analysis and scholarships. Ms. Wurtzel’s, that includes poorly styled pictures of, in lots of instances, prosaic gadgets, was haphazard. However trying by means of all of the choices, I had the identical feeling that I used to be trespassing and that the lives in query had been laid out like an overturned drawer for the soiled fingers of the web to paw by means of.
To a point, it isn’t solely these three lives which have ended but additionally the dream they represented — of coming to New York, getting a job at a well-known journal and writing your option to stardom. The journal business is a really totally different place now, and it isn’t funding that dream as lavishly because it used to.
To borrow one in all Ms. Didion’s best-known strains: “We inform ourselves tales as a way to stay.” Future generations of writers could have to search out one other story to inform themselves. However they’ll be capable of click on again by means of the public sale listings and see how fairly it used to look.
Carina Chocano is the creator of “You Play the Woman,” which received the Nationwide Guide Critics Circle Award for criticism.
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