Beholder of Beauty

André Leon Talley was the last great editor of a lost era.

There is a scene early in “The September Issue,” the 2009 documentary about the making of the year’s door-stopper Vogue magazine, that features a meeting between the designer Vera Wang, dressed down in a striped shirt and no makeup, and, like a character from an entirely different movie set, the editor André Leon Talley: very tall, very imposing, in dark glasses, silk tie and bespoke suit, swathed in a mink shawl. They are discussing the state of New York fashion.

“It is a famine of beauty,” Mr. Talley enunciates with an air of great tragedy. In case she didn’t understand the weight of his words, he repeated them: “A famine of beauty.” And again, “A famine of beauty, honey.”

Then, finally: “My eyes are starving for beauty!”