Talking Fall 2011 Fashion In The Car With André Leon Talley

Since its Fashion Week 2011 HW wanted to know what the trends are for this season (note: Fashion Week is like Harlem Week, it’s actually more than a week, it lasts four weeks with shows in London, Milan, Paris). NY Mag spoke to André Leon Talley, the Vogue editor, the reality-television judge extraordinaire about trends, here’s what he said:

Capital D: Dressy

“… There is a mood that I think is strong which is dress up, dress up. Dress up with a capital D,” says André Leon Talley, he continued “It’s dressier for the American market than it’s been in a long time, and perhaps in the sensibility of dressing up, some may have gone off the cliff and overboard — but I’m not going to say who that is,” Talley says with a laugh. “But we’re not looking for retro glamour, we’re looking for modernity and youth and youthfulness and sexuality that’s contemporary and urban. But I do think the trend of dressing up is a good thing.”

Die-ANNE: Beauty and Glamor

If Talley were to dress someone tomorrow for a red carpet, he knows exactly what he’d put her in. “I would certainly be going to Diane Von Furstenberg” — he says it “dee-AHN,” not “die-ANNE” — “for the black-and-white gaucho look with the print — I think it was like a shirt and pants with a black belt and the black Maria Felix hat. Or I would be going to her for the sensibility of fringe boots in burgundy suede with a beautiful rust cinnamon skirt, with a deep ruby red blouse.”  He adds, “All of these looks are coming from Diane Von Furstenberg and her jet set youth of the seventies in Paris, when one partied all night and worked very hard during the day to be beautifully dressed and to be glamorous. That’s what I would be dressing someone in right now.”

Urban Pragmatism: Long Skirts

Talley is less keen on: the much-talked about long skirts, often in winter wool fabric, that have saturated the runways this season. “It’s not a look I would call urban pragmatism,” declares Talley. “The average woman, I don’t think, is going to give a hoot about a skirt to the floor as she navigates herself from her morning wake-up moments, to dropping the kids off at school and going on to the office. However, a young fashionista might do that to be edgy and cool, but she’s going to have a hard time. Look at all this dirty snow. Do you REALLY want to go out in the snow with your clothes sweeping through the old — four-week old — mounds of snow all over the sidewalks? I don’t think so. It’s not a pretty picture.”

Sir, you’re going to take Whoopi to the Armory when we leave here,” he instructs her driver. That would be for the Marc Jacobs show, of course.