Carte Blanche in the Couture By Miriam R. Kramer On furlough because of the impact of COVID-19, I have been trying to strike a balance between paying attention to the news and maintaining balance. This spring has been a brutal time for our country and the world. The unpredictable pandemic has thrown other societal fault-lines into keen relief. Black Lives Matter protests have boiled over after filmed incidents of police brutality against Black men and women reached a tipping point with the death of George Floyd. As one who loves style, fashion, and art, when I heard that noted African-American Vogue editor André Leon Talley’s new memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, had been released, I was immediately intrigued to read it. It has proven fascinating and particularly illuminating within the context of these protests to see all that Monsieur Talley has achieved as a journalist and aesthetic tastemaker against strong societal headwinds in such a relatively short amount of time. Talley’s tale of becoming is an inspirational story of a man with the spiritual strength and wherewithal to define himself from his childhood in the homophobic, racially segregated North Carolina of the Fifties and Sixties to his coming of age on the scene of fashion journalism in New York and Paris from the Seventies onwards. An arts lover devoted to the pages of Vogue, he grew up in Durham, NC in his grandmother’s house, reading his way through his local library and going across town as a pre-teen to buy his favorite magazine. His beloved “Mama” raised him to comport himself with dignity and self-respect within the Baptist church, which was also one of his training grounds in loving the fashion he saw modeled by his family and friends every Sunday. He started forming his own definitions of luxury from her…