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Bill Cunningham, the blue-jacketed originator of street-style photography who pioneered the notion that fashion lived on the street, died today at the age of 87, a spokesperson for his employer, The New York Times, confirmed. Cunningham had been hospitalized following a recent stroke.
Cunningham was a fixture of the Times’s style section for nearly half a century, publishing weekly chronicles of the ebbs of New York fashion through his collages of trends he saw emerging among the metropolitan masses—modern interpretations of the cape; the sockless era for men; dusty pastels for winter—as well as the comings-and-goings of the New York’s benefit-attending aristocracy.
While he was a beloved cult icon in New York City for decades—often spotted snapping pedestrians on his bicycle, or darting along the edges of an uptown benefit, almost always in his blue French workman’s jacket—he rose to considerable prominence after the release of Richard Press’s 2010 documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, which trailed the photographer as he went on daily pilgrimages on his trusty Schwinn and fraternized with his bohemian neighbors in the no-longer-extant apartments for artists above Carnegie Hall, as well as provided clues to what made the joyful but elusive man behind the lens tick. Audiences were delighted by Cunningham’s tireless attention to his craft, his buoyant persona, and his parsimonious lifestyle—$2 egg sandwiches, and his uniform of khakis, and that jacket, purchased for $20—that improbably enshrined him in a world that can seem fixated on wealth and excess.
His eye was triumphantly democratic: a single column could include Nan Kempner in custom Yves Saint Laurent beside the Club Kid fixtures whose homespun couture made New York’s avant-garde underground churn. He worked as a kind of fashion anthropologist, who was as passionate about chronicling trends as he was about recognizing spectacular individuality. “We all get dressed for Bill,” Vogue editor Anna Wintour, a regular fixture in Cunningham’s columns, remarked in Press’s film.
Born in Boston in 1929, Cunningham began his career in fashion as a milliner, turning out fantastical, innovative creations of fringe, tulle, and feathers for a cast of high-society women. After serving a tour of duty in the Army, he began chronicling the fashion world—first in the written word, then with a camera—for Women’s Wear Daily during editor John Fairchild’s unforgiving aegis, after which defected to the Chicago Tribune before landing at the New York Times in the late 70s. After he captured a photograph of the reclusive Greta Garbo—in action, he darted and dodged to get his shots, his style not dissimilar from that of a war photographer—he became enamored with chronicling the effusion of high fashion on the streets of New York, highlighting the designs of the moment not as they appeared on the highly stylized runway, but as real women and men interpreted the clothing in their everyday lives.
Though Cunningham’s work has appeared in the Times for years, his influence was felt even more pointedly over the past decade in the midst of the fashion blogging and street-style revolution, which minted stars out of editors and It Girls out of bloggers. As the throng outside fashion shows, parties, and benefits ballooned to a global pack of star photographers, Cunningham could reliably be seen leadings its ranks—even from the fringes where he could get his desired shot—up until the end.
(VANITY FAIR)
