The women in his life: in his new memoir, Vogue's Andre Leon Talley forgoes the fashion dish and tells all about two beloved mentors--his grandmother and Diana Vreeland.

A.L.T. * Andre Leon Talley * Villard * $24.95

Don't turn to Andre Leon Talley for bitchy fashion gossip. Vogue's editor at large won't participate. In his warm, often sentimental memoir, A.L.T., the closest he comes to airing that sort of laundry is an account of photographing former first lady Barbara Bush:

"I was wearing a large gold Yves Saint Laurent rose in my lapel. I was in the Lincoln bedroom, scouting a location for our shoot, when the first lady appeared.

"She looked me over and asked, `What's that on your lapel?'

"`It's a gold rose,' I said, drawing deep from my reserves of Southern politeness.

"`That's a lot of rose,' she said, and then did not say another word to me during the entire session."

Talley's account of his life in fashion, from his childhood in Durham, N.C., spending hours cutting pictures out of the pages of Vogue, to his later jet-setting career helping to create that same magazine, is surprisingly reserved. None of the scandals or sexual revelations typically associated with contemporary memoir-writing are on display here. ("The catty anecdotes in which books about fashion abound may be titillating, but they are not what ultimately matters," he writes.)

Instead, Talley devotes the bulk of his story to a glowing memorial of the two most important women in his life, both now deceased: his maternal grandmother, Bennie Frances Davis, and his mentor and boss, Vogue's Diana Vreeland. An only child raised by Davis, Talley was her shadow, absorbing every detail of the immaculate house she kept ("Until I left home, I never used a towel that hadn't been ironed"), the clothes she wore, and the churchgoing values she taught.

The book's second half details the influence of Vreeland, who stepped into Talley's life with her Kabuki makeup, foghorn voice, and nonstop exuberance. ("Right-o, Andre, let's get crackin'!" was her usual refrain to her protege.)

Talley's subject is not so much himself as it is the women who taught him to maintain that self, and therefore the fact that the reader learns little about his loves, struggles, or other "titillating" information is of little consequence. Talley's prose is affectionate and joyful, which befits a man whose job it is to appreciate beauty. And his response to his not-so-beautiful encounter with Mrs. Bush sums up the book's tone: "I have always known that if you follow your own beat, you might not always be dancing in time with those around you, but you will turn out to be a very good dancer."

White writes about film for E! Online.