Due to his fastidious approach to image making, and devotion to his craft, Bill Cunningham created an extraordinary body of work that not only captured the history of fashion, but also the zeitgeist of his time. Born in and raised in Massachusetts, Cunningham briefly attended Harvard University before moving to New York City to pursue a career as a milliner. With this in mind, he then made the prescient transition to journalism.
At first writing columns, and then publishing photographs beginning in , Cunningham spent most of his career working for The New York Times.
Cunningham stayed on at The Times until his death in Cunningham was a keen observer of the various intersections of cosmopolitan life. His photographs captured clothing in the three arenas in which fashion is disseminated to the public: haute couture shows, parties and events, and most prominently, the street style of New York City and Paris.
The photographs depict the evolution of trends and attitudes that spoke to politics and moments of cultural transition. His focus and pleasure was portraying arbiters of taste from Diana Vreeland, Anna Wintour, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to people with distinct style who stood out among the many walking down Fifty-Seventh Street. He believed that a true portrait of fashion — and, by inference, the times — depended on seeing how real people dressed, whether kids in deconstructed sweatshirts or big spenders at a charity event.
He was able to commingle with guests, yet stay separate enough to create compelling and candid images. Additionally, at the time of his death, Cunningham left behind the manuscript of an autobiography which he titled Fashion Climbing, which was published posthumously in For generations of fashionable New Yorkers, Bill Cunningham was nothing short of a legend.
The film, "The Times of Bill Cunningham," follows another Cunningham documentary released in , while he was still alive, as well as a number of other projects which commemorated the longtime New Yorker including a memoir discovered posthumously. The new film is the first Cunningham-related project from Mark Bozek, the director who also conducted the interview with Cunningham which comprises much of the film and features previously unreleased photographs from Cunningham's vast archive.
He's referring to the small studio inside Carnegie Hall where Cunningham lived among other bohemian tenants a remnant of old New York, much like the artist apartments inside the Chelsea Hotel, you'd be hard pressed to find in the city today.
The documentary chronicles Cunningham's start as a milliner in France during the Korean War, his proximity to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and his four decades spent working for the New York Times. Most of those details are already known to those who know anything about Cunningham — they were recounted in the documentary, as well as an exhibit at the New York Historical Society in The finer memories of Cunningham's entry into fashion and New York society, however, are what give the film its meat.
While he served in the army, he would attend fashion shows in Paris during his "leave," and send Balenciaga dresses through the army mail to dressmakers in New York who were keen on copying the trend-setting French designs while bypassing U. Cunningham then returned the painting to Lopez, without taking the money back, so Lopez could sell it again.
While the fact of his monk-like existence is well known, his assumed wealth is not oft discussed after his death — this is despite his friends in New York society gifting him countless pieces of artwork and clothing which would be considered highly valuable today. Perhaps most striking about this latest Cunningham documentary is that there is nothing evidently dark or complicated about his story save the grief he expressed over his friends lost to AIDS.
The idea that a good man can live modestly and devote himself to his work, with little expectation for recognition or praise, seems so strange in today's world.
Yet Cunningham remains as relevant as ever, having influenced some of the most well-known street style photographers like Tommy Ton and The Sartorialist and inspiring an altogether new crop of talent. He also loved fashionable people and would only photograph those whose style he admired.
Since Cunningham only got into photography in when he was gifted a camera, it was an afterthought to his lifelong commitment to documenting fashion. He had one goal: to see how everyday style is curated by everyday people on the streets of New York. Many will say that Cunningham inspired the era of Instagram influencers, as he was dressed by magazine editors, when not wearing secondhand garments from high profile friends.
Photographers like Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton, and Richard Avedon are some of the greatest fashion photographers, but what Cunningham did was make it unpretentious, no-frills. In one famous photo series, he showed how everyday women wore designer clothing and compared it to how models wore it on a runway.
From striped t-shirts to sunglasses, fanny packs, tote bags and even jogging pants, he was always keen to spot a trend in his weekly photo reports for The Times.
As Anna Wintour says in the new film, he always saw things that the rest of the fashion journalists had overlooked or forgotten. In one scene, he spots men wearing t-shirts that have sunglasses on them, in another, he does a roundup of black heels in the summer.
He famously ripped up paychecks from Details magazine, because he felt that limited his freedom. It was a belief he held all his life. Iris was a Palm Beach socialite when he would photograph her on the streets, mostly for fashion week.
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