Bill Cunningham — a legend of street photography and one of the symbols of New York. However, he became a star and a public favorite back in the mid-20th century, when he wore extravagant hats and wrote columns in fashion publications.
In this autobiographical book, Cunningham talks about his first steps in the city of freedom and glamour, about the golden age of high fashion, and about his journey to the heights of the fashion Olympus. At the very beginning, he had neither money nor connections — only talent and incredible optimism. He would look at the windows of the most luxurious boutiques in the city and dream of dedicating his life to fashion. Taking on the pseudonym William J., Bill became one of the most original and famous hat designers of his era.
Bill Cunningham vividly, wittily, and passionately describes the backstage world of fashion and his adventures in it.
Bill Cunningham was not a street or fashion photographer, nor was he a paparazzo, but — paradoxically — he combined the best qualities of all the above-mentioned genres. His unique perspective and impressive dedication to fashion, combined with the philosophy of an ascetic aesthete, became a unique phenomenon, and Cunningham's biography is as surprising as his photos.
Bill first felt a passion for fashion, oddly enough, in church in the early 1940s. "I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I was already focused on women's hats," Cunningham later recalled. Growing up, Bill would open his own hat-making atelier, but the closest he came to the "fashion industry" was working as a courier for a tailor. Later, he got a job as a stock clerk in a department store, where he quickly learned to distinguish beautiful and high-quality items from average everyday ones.
At nineteen, having dropped out of Harvard University, Cunningham moved to New York, where he dreamed of opening a small hat-making atelier-shop. Three hundred dollars saved from his scholarship, which seemed enormous to Bill, gave him the courage — he decided to rent a room in the very center of New York. From Carnegie Shop, where Cunningham came with a proposal to rent a space, the young businessman was sent to the address of... a psychiatric ward.
Eventually, adjusting his appetites, Bill found a small room almost in the attic, and he paid the rent by cleaning the entire building while also working as a street advertiser and a lunch delivery boy. The business did not pay off the costs of materials much, but Cunningham was happy. He seemed to never know how to be discouraged. Even when Cunningham was mobilized into the army, luck did not leave him — Bill served in Paris, where he could freely attend fashion shows of the best houses.
Returning to the USA, his hat-making business finally reached a qualitatively new level, and he was invited to cooperate with a haute couture salon that made replicas of Chanel, Givenchy, and Dior designs. In the 1950s, visitors to this salon included, for example, Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Jacqueline, after her husband's assassination, sent Cunningham her red suit to be dyed black for the funeral.
The experience of working with star and bohemian clients pushed Bill towards journalism — he began photographing fashionably dressed people on the streets of New York and publishing photos in Women's Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune. In fact, when hats went out of fashion and Cunningham's business became unprofitable, photography and column writing became his life's work. Until his death at eighty-eight years old, he would go out to the corner of Fifth Avenue and bike around the neighborhood, always ready with his camera.
The result of his work was not street photography, although it was literally done on the street without any preparation. It was not fashion photography either, although Cunningham was most interested in fashion in all its forms. It was not paparazzi work, as the photographer did not aim to invade personal lives — he was only interested in outfits, and thus Cunningham was not perceived negatively or aggressively by the stars.
Sometimes ordinary people, random passersby whose outfits seemed unusual, extravagant, refined, or elegant to the photographer, fell into Cunningham's lens. But a special achievement of Cunningham's is considered how he started photographing stars in everyday life. Often he did not even notice that he was photographing a star — the great actress Greta Garbo on one of his photos was recognized by Cunningham only later, with the help of readers. "I thought, look at the cut of that shoulder! It's so beautiful. All I noticed was the coat and the shoulder." Later, Cunningham's lens captured various stars: David Bowie, Boy George, Naomi Campbell, Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, and many others.
But those who sometimes could not contain their anger were the owners of fashion houses and designers. The fact is that Cunningham was not only an accurate photographer but also a sharp journalist. He was incorruptible and did not recognize the right of authorities to make mistakes. He could ruthlessly criticize a new show by Chanel, for instance, and praise an independent company for making everyday clothes. Achieving such independence was made possible by the fact that Cunningham was a freelancer all his life and everywhere. If he was invited to an event, he did not touch the refreshments there. "I just try to play fair, and in New York, that's very... practically impossible. Honestly, in New York, it's like Don Quixote fighting windmills," Cunningham said in his later years.
The best illustration of such simplicity is the fact that one of the main fashion observers in the USA preferred to go to work in ordinary black sneakers, a blue jacket, and with a single "accessory" in the form of a camera. Until his death, Bill Cunningham lived in a small apartment in Carnegie Hall with amenities on the floor. After him, a collection of about three million photographs remained, most of which were never published. Grateful New Yorkers asked the city authorities to name the corner of Fifth Avenue, where Bill Cunningham so often "hunted" for shots, after him in memory of the outstanding photographer.
"He knew everyone," said John Fairchild, publisher of Women's Wear Daily and Cunningham's first employer, about him. "He didn't just hang around the office on the phone, but went out on the street and came back with the best materials. The entire editorial team envied him." He really did know everyone — from the mid to late 1960s, working as a freelancer for the Chicago Tribune, he covered everything important happening in New York at that time: independent cinema, parties at Max’s Kansas City club and the Chelsea Hotel, about Halston and Warhol. Later, when Cunningham moved to The New York Times as a photographer and author of the columns "On the Street" and "Evening Hours," both would become the subjects of his photo reports. The subjects themselves envied their chronicler. "I saw Bill Cunningham on a bike. I wish I could do what he does — just ride around the city all day and take pictures," Warhol wrote in his diary on May 17, 1984.
The world of fashion in the USA was inextricably linked to the world of "old money": without the desire to outdo European designers and the limitless financial possibilities for this, American fashion, it seems, would not have happened. As without Bill. David Rockefeller told this story: "Brooke Astor invited Bill to her 100th birthday. We did not invite journalists, but she wanted to see Bill — as a friend."
Cunningham himself boasted that he supposedly did not recognize celebrities. Starting to work for The Times, he would stand at the corner of boutique 57th Street and 5th Avenue in New York and wait. Once, Greta Garbo, in sunglasses and a nutria coat, slipped past him. Cunningham claims he did not recognize the actress, he just liked the coat, but the next day this issue caused a furor: never before had the most respectable newspaper in the country printed photos of celebrities (the editor recognized Garbo) without their permission. "I don't believe it when he says he doesn't recognize people in his photos. God, he recognized the elusive Garbo!" recalled his editor at the time. So yes, it is deceitful: the popular young heir to the real estate empire and showman Donald Trump at the same corner of 57th and 5th streets in the late 1980s he could not fail to recognize. No coincidences.
Few texts about Cunningham are complete without a quote from Anna Wintour from the 2010 documentary "Tribute: Bill Cunningham New York." These words were spread even during the photographer's lifetime, who passed away in 2016: "We all dressed for Bill." A good phrase, and no wonder Wintour, a wordsmith, repeated it several times, but it sounds best in full because it fully reveals the photographer's creative method: "It feels like only he cares about how you are dressed. And he always chooses the best pictures where you look your best." In this sensitivity and attention to his subjects — that's all Cunningham. As he wrote himself: "The thing is, I'm not really a good photographer. Honestly, I'm too shy. Not aggressive at all. I just liked and still like photographing beautifully dressed women. That's all."
But Cunningham's main legacy is, of course, the photographs of city dwellers. The archive of his column "On the Street" is truly unique. These are not just collections of photos of women and men dressed in something similar (in yellow coats or leather jackets), but almost every time — a detailed commentary on why these things are worn now and what it means in the context of fashion history. And sometimes just — jokes about New Yorkers who went out on the street with bare shoulders and thin-soled shoes after the terrible snowstorm in January 2016. But this was already towards the end of life, and in the 1970s, such an approach was a real revolution. Fashion was on the shows, but not on the street, no one knew how these clothes looked on live people. "I realized that all this makes no sense until you start shooting both the runways and the street — just to show how people interpret what designers sell them. I realized that the street was the missing element (in fashion journalism)," Cunningham said in 2002.
