André Leon Talley is an American fashion journalist and the former American editor-at-large of Vogue magazine. He was the magazine's fashion news director from 1983 to 1987 and then its creative director from 1988 to 1995. He has authored three books, including two memoirs, and co-authored a book with Richard Bernstein. Talley has also served as the international editor of the Russian fashion magazine Numéro.

Talley is the son of Alma Ruth Davis and William C. Talley, a taxi driver. At least one grandfather was a sharecropper. His parents left him with his maternal grandmother, Binnie Francis Davis, who worked as a cleaning lady at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She raised him, with Talley saying he was given from her an "understanding of luxury," and for whom he has expressed, since her death, "I miss her almost every day."

He grew up in the Jim Crow era South, where segregation defined social boundaries. He has said, "For a long time, my grandmother would not allow white people to come into our house. That was her rule. The only white man who ever came into the house was the coroner." His love for fashion was cultivated at an early age by her and his discovery of Vogue magazine, which he first found in the local library at the age of nine or 10.

Talley was educated at Hillside High School, graduating in 1966, and at North Carolina Central University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French Literature in 1970. He won a scholarship to Brown University, earning a Master of Arts degree in French Literature in 1972. At Brown, he wrote a thesis on the influence of black women on Charles Baudelaire and initially planned to teach French.

Through the student connections he made in Providence, Rhode Island, he apprenticed, unpaid, for Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974. So impressed by his skills, the Vogue editor connected Talley with a job at Andy Warhol's Factory and Interview magazine for $50 a week. He worked at Women’s Wear Daily, becoming its Paris bureau chief, and W, from 1975 through 1980. He also worked for The New York Times and other publications before finally landing at Vogue, where he worked as the Fashion News Director from 1983 to 1987 and then as Creative Director from 1988 to 1995. He pushed top designers to have more African-American models in their shows. In 1984 he co-wrote with Richard Bernstein the book MegaStar, with an introduction by Paloma Picasso, which includes portraits of celebrities. He left Vogue and moved to Paris in 1995 to work for W and served as contributing editor at Vogue. In 1998, he returned to Vogue as the editor-at-large until his departure in 2013 to pursue another editorial venture.

In 2003, he published an autobiography, A.L.T.: A Memoir, by Villard 2003. According to Publishers Weekly, the message delivered by the book is that "Style transcends race, class, and time." Two years later, he authored A.L.T. 365+, an art monograph designed by art director Sam Shahid. Three hundred sixty-five features photos and captions from one year of Talley's life.

In 2008, Talley advised the Obama family on fashion, introducing Michelle Obama to the Taiwanese-Canadian designer Jason Wu, from whom she bought several dresses, including her inaugural gown. Talley's famous recent pairings have been with designers Tracy Reese, Rachel Roy, and singer/actress Jennifer Hudson. He is a friend of pop diva Mariah Carey, fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, and tennis star Venus Williams.

From March 2010 to December 2011, Talley served on the judging panel for America's Next Top Model (from Cycle 14 to Cycle 17). From 2013 to 2014, he served as international editor of Numéro Russia, joining the team shortly after the magazine launched in March 2013 but resigning after 12 issues. He has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Savannah College of Art and Design since 1995.

In January 2017, he live-blogged the Trump inauguration with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. In April of that year, Talley began hosting his radio show principally concerned with fashion and pop culture on Sirius XM satellite station Radio Andy.

Talley is the subject of a documentary film, The Gospel According to André, directed by Kate Novack, which was screened in September 2016 at the Toronto Film Festival and was released in the US on May 25, 2018. Reviewing the film, Variety said: "The documentary is a deeply loving, frequently beautiful testament to the former Vogue editor, who rose from humble beginnings in North Carolina to become arguably the high fashion world’s first major African-American tastemaker, as well as the type of multi-lingual, Russian-lit-citing public intellectual who is perfectly at ease gossiping on TV with Wendy Williams." It was available on Disney's Hulu in 2020.

He released The Chiffon Trenches: A Memoir on May 19, 2020. In it, he discusses getting his start in New York City in the 1970s, his tumultuous relationship with Wintour, and his experiences with racism in the fashion world.

Talley died from complications of a heart attack and COVID-19 at a hospital in White Plains, New York, on January 18, 2022, at the age of 73.

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