A few summers ago, on upper Fifth Avenue, Bill Cunningham spied a remarkable creature: a woman, in her seventies, with a corona of blue hair—not the muzzy pastel hue associated with bad dye jobs but the irradiant one of Slurpees and laundry detergent. The woman gave Cunningham an idea. Every day for a month, whenever he saw something cerulean (a batik shawl) or aqua (a Hawaiian-print sarong) or azure (a Japanese parasol) coming down the sidewalk, he snapped a picture of it. One morning, he spotted a worker balancing, on his shoulder, a stuffed blue marlin. “I thought, That’s it, kid!” he recently recalled. The following Sunday, “On the Street,” the street-fashion column that Cunningham has maintained in the Times for more than a decade, was populated entirely with New Yorkers dressed in various shades of the color—a parade of human paint chips. “Mediterranean shades of blue are not yet the new pink, but they are a favorite this summer,” he wrote. “The cooling watery tones, worn as an accent with white and browns, appear in turquoise-color jewelry and blue hair, but it is rare to see a man crossing the Avenue of the Americas with a trophy sailfish.”
Cunningham’s job is not so different from a fisherman’s: it requires a keen knowledge, honed over years, of the local ecosystem and infinite patience in all manner of weather conditions. His first big catch was an accident. It was 1978, and a woman wearing a nutria coat had caught his eye. “I thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful,’ ” he later wrote. “And it was a plain coat, too. You’d look at it and think: ‘Oh, are you crazy? It’s nothing.’ ” Cunningham shot frame after frame of the coat, eventually noticing that other people on the sidewalk were paying attention to its wearer. It was Greta Garbo. Cunningham showed the pictures, along with some shots of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (whom he recognized), Farrah Fawcett (whom he didn’t, not owning a television), and the King and Queen of Spain, carrying plastic bags from Gristedes, to an editor at the Times. “The editor said, ‘Why don’t you wait and see who you get next week?’ ” Cunningham recalled. “And I said, ‘My God, I’m not expecting Jesus Christ.’ ” Soon after, his column became a recurring feature.
“On the Street”—along with Cunningham’s society column, “Evening Hours”—is New York’s high-school yearbook, an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked. Class of 1992: velvet neck ribbons, leopard prints, black jeans, catsuits, knotted shirts, tote bags, berets (will they ever come back, after Monica?). Class of 2000: clamdiggers, beaded fringe, postcard prints, jean jackets, fish-net stockings, flower brooches (this was the height of “Sex and the City”). The column, in its way, is as much a portrait of New York at a given moment in time as any sociological tract or census—a snapshot of the city. On September 16, 2001, Cunningham ran a collage of signs (“OUR FINEST HOUR,” “WE ARE STRONGER NOW”) and flags (on bandannas, on buildings, on bikes) that makes one as sad and proud, looking at it now, as it did when it was published. So far this year, he has identified vogues for picture-frame collars, microminis, peg-legged pants, and the color gray (“often with a dash of sapphire or violet,” in the manner of the Edwardians). His columns are frequently playful—he once featured a woman, near the Plaza, walking three standard poodles, “an unmatched set in pink, turquoise, and white”—but they also convey an elegiac respect for the anonymous promenade of life in a big city, and a dead-serious desire to get it all down.
For two groups of New Yorkers—the fashionable people, whose style changes more rapidly than that of the masses, and the truly creative ones, whose style, while outré, in its theatricality never really changes at all—“On the Street” is also a family album. The magazine editors Anna Wintour, Cecilia Dean, and Carine Roitfeld and the society dermatologist Lisa Airan are regulars on the page, as are Tziporah Salamon (her Web site showcases her eight appearances in Cunningham’s column, including one—a Capri-pants montage—in which only her legs are visible), and Louise Doktor, a midtown executive secretary, whose experimental outfits Cunningham has been documenting from afar for twenty-five years. “She once bought a coat with four sleeves!” he told me. At a party thrown last season at Bergdorf Goodman to celebrate the decoration of the store’s windows in Cunningham’s honor, guests included not only the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the Times (“You’re great! This is a really big thing,” he said, grabbing Cunningham, who had shown up at his behest, by the shoulders), but a woman wearing, on her head, what looked like one of those blue pompoms from a car wash, and a man with a Swiss-dot veil drawn in ink on his forehead.
Cunningham, who turns eighty this month, is an annual presence at certain society events: the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade, the Central Park Conservancy luncheon, the Hampton Classic Horse Show. This winter, at the ice-skating rink in Central Park, he took pictures of the children of the children whose parents he once shot outside Maxim’s and at the Hotel Pierre (where, at a dinner dance in 1984, he captured thirty-three women in similar Fabrice beaded gowns). His vocabulary (“Cheers, child!”) and his diction (“Mrs. Oh-nah-sis”) are those of a more genteel era—the weekly audio slideshow he does for the Times offers many of the pleasures of a Lomax recording—but he rarely goes for the easy grip-and-grin shot. His sensibility is exhilaratingly democratic. He takes wonder, or whimsy, where he finds it, chronicling the Obama Inauguration, the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Wigstock, and the snowman sweatshirts and reindeer turtlenecks of tourists; the do-rag and the way that, at one point in 2000, many young hip-hop fans spontaneously took to wearing their sweatshirts abstractly, with the neck hole on the shoulder, or with the sleeves dangling down the back. (He related the phenomenon to both the Japanese deconstructionists and the sideways baseball cap.)
The four corners of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street are some of Cunningham’s favorite shoals. One bright afternoon, he was there, as he has been for countless hours, casting about for inspiration. “I have an idea what I’m going to do this week,” he said. (What that was he refused to say.) “I’ve got to face the bullet very quickly. If it doesn’t have enough depth, I should wait.” It was a crackerjack day. “Look at the style you have here!” Cunningham said. “Stay here on Fifth Avenue and you see the whole world. Summertime—the vacationers and the Europeans. The holidays—everyone from the Midwest, the West, Japan. They’re all here, the whole world!”
Cunningham lives alone in the Carnegie Hall Tower, one of the last tenants in a formerly vast complex of artists’ studios, without a private bathroom or cooking facilities. His bed consists of a piece of foam, a wooden board, and several milk crates. Nearby is a metal file cabinet crammed with decades’ worth of negatives. (Trip Gabriel, the editor of the Times’ Sunday Styles section, where Cunningham’s column appears, told me that when Cunningham goes to the Paris collections “our reporters are staying right in the First Arrondissement, sometimes at the Ritz, and Bill insists on staying at a cheapo hotel that has no phones in the rooms.” To make a reservation, he sends a postcard.) “When I fall out of bed in the morning, I can come over here and get up my adrenaline,” Cunningham said, blowing his nose into a deli napkin that he produced from a pocket of the blue workman’s smock that he customarily wears, as if to say, in solidarity with the hot-dog venders and delivery boys amid whom he spends his days, that his office is the street. Around his neck was a battered Nikon. Its strap was held together with duct tape. Cunningham has often been described as a fashion monk, but he is closer to an oblate—a layperson who has dedicated his life to the tribe without becoming a part of it. A friend of Cunningham’s told Artforum in 1996, “One of Bill’s favorite sayings, when anyone starts taking the fashion scene too seriously, is ‘Oops, you’re falling into the traps of the rich.’ ” In a recent column, examining the way New Yorkers dress for wet weather, Cunningham poked fun at “the snobs,” who “are so above it all, they think the waters will part for them even as they sink to their ankles.”
Behind Cunningham, the windows of Bergdorf’s were festooned with blow-ups of his columns. Linda Fargo, the store’s vice-president of visual merchandising, said it had taken ten years to persuade Cunningham to agree to the exhibit. “Bill is not somebody you can ever press yourself on,” Fargo said. “I once, to thank him for something, gave him a very small box of chocolates, and he personally delivered it back to my office two days later.” In one of the windows, there was a red bicycle with silver fenders, in tribute to his customary means of conveyance. There was confetti made from shredded newspapers. “I’m delighted, but also a little embarrassed, because you try to be invisible, and this blows your cover!” Cunningham said, hoisting the Nikon to his eye and darting off, mid-sentence, in pursuit of a woman with a fetching fur-lined handbag.
“Luckily, you can slip back into being anonymous very quickly,” he continued, once he’d returned. “I don’t really see people—I see clothes. People say everybody’s a slob. Ridiculous! There are marvellously”—it came out, in a wonderful archaic honk, as “maah-vah-lously”—“dressed women you see at a quarter to eight, going to business. When people say fashion is no more, they’re ridiculous! It’s as good as it ever was.”
I asked if he ever photographed people who didn’t look so great, the sidewalk’s blooper reel. He seemed almost offended. “I’m not drawn to something awful,” he said. “I wouldn’t even see that. I’m looking for something that has beauty. Do’s and don’ts? I don’t think there are any don’ts! What right does one have? It’s like the Queen of England, when she appears, and people have nasty things to say. My God, she’s dressing for her station and her office!”
A burly man dressed in a flannel shirt and steel-toed boots approached. “Hi! I’d like to shake the hand of the kid!” he said, boomingly, offering his palm to Cunningham, who smiled. The two men began shadowboxing.
“Congrats, Billy. Can’t believe they even got a bicycle in the window!”
The man headed off down the sidewalk, and, as he faded from view, I asked who he was.
“You get to know people,” Cunningham said, explaining that it was an undercover cop.
Cunningham was born and brought up in Boston, the second of four children in an Irish Catholic family. There remains about him a distinct New Englishness. “One of our colleagues says that his voice sounds like that of an elderly hardware-store owner in Vermont,” Trip Gabriel said. At the Times, Cunningham doesn’t use a computer; he recently got a desk, and voice mail, which he has never checked. The paper got rid of its film-processing lab a few years ago, when it went digital, so Cunningham has his film developed at a one-hour photo center, on Forty-third Street. Each week, he brings a batch of his negatives to the office, where a member of the art department helps him create a layout. “He has browbeaten and exhausted and worn out the patience of generations of assistants in that process,” Gabriel said, with affection.
“It was difficult around the turn of this century,” Cunningham said, “because I had older art directors and they had other ideas of how things should be laid out. No one could stand me. Too much trouble! Five pictures, and that’s it. I said, ‘You can’t do that. You’ve got to tell a story to the reader.’ I’m writing with pictures—that’s what I always tell them. You go and tell Maureen Dowd she can only use fifteen words, and no changes. That’s ridiculous!” He continued, “Young kids, aren’t they wonderful? Not because I push them around—I would never do that—but because they’re more open to new thought.”
According to “Bill on Bill”—an autobiographical article, published in the Times in 2002, that for those with an interest in Cunningham has taken on the authority of a holy text—Cunningham got his start in fashion as a stockboy at Bonwit Teller, where an executive, noticing his habit of watching the lunchtime passersby (“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s my hobby’ ”), encouraged him to revamp their outfits in his mind’s eye. In 1948, after a few months of classes at Harvard, Cunningham arrived in New York, where he lived with an aunt and uncle and worked at Bonwit’s, again, in advertising, his uncle’s profession. “That’s why my family allowed me to come here and encouraged me to go into the business,” he wrote in “Bill on Bill.” “I think they were worried I was becoming too interested in women’s dresses.”
Actually, hats. After a year, Cunningham rented a top-floor room in a walkup on East Fifty-second Street. In exchange for the apartment, he agreed to clean for the men who owned the building. He worked at a drugstore, and at Howard Johnson, as a counterman. (“Both jobs provided my meals,” he wrote, “and the dimes and nickels of my tips paid for millinery supplies.”) He sold his creations to a carriage-trade clientele under the name William J. “My family would have been too embarrassed,” he recalled. “They were very shy people.”
During the Korean War, Cunningham was drafted into the Army; when he returned to New York he resumed the hat trade from a shop on West Fifty-fourth Street. In 1963, John Fairchild hired him as a writer at Women’s Wear Daily. (Eventually, he went on to cover fashion for the Chicago Tribune and for Details.) For a time in the late fifties, he owned a hat shop on Jobs Lane, in Southampton. He is said to have slept on a cot, hanging his wardrobe—khakis, a shirt, a pair of underwear—over the closet door. In 1966, a photographer Cunningham knew gave him an Olympus Pen D half-frame camera. “It cost about thirty-five dollars,” Cunningham wrote. “He said, ‘Here, use it like a notebook.’ And that was the real beginning.”
The best ensembles Cunningham ever saw were in the sixties. “I was at a fashion show on Seventh Avenue one day, and I heard commotion out on the street,” he said. “I said, ‘Huh, what’s that?’ and got up and left the show and saw all these flower children protesting the Vietnam War. I suddenly realized that I had always liked the street. I should have known all along.” Other scenes that have stuck with him: the “incredible things” from “those marvellous concerts in Tompkins Square Park”; a woman, walking up Madison Avenue, in a beige-and-black knitted suit from Sonia Rykiel, accompanied by two beige-and-black pug dogs on Venetian-red leashes with gold bells.
Cunningham stepped up to one of the Bergdorf windows and peered at the exhibit inside. “Oh, this is a Doktor,” he said, referring to a shot of Mrs. Doktor, the secretary, with the hushed reverence accorded a Renoir or a van Gogh, as if she, not he, were the artist. “One of the most fascinating. That’s a wooden gold picture frame that she’s wearing as a necklace. I got up close, and saw that it had been cut and it was on hinges, so that it conformed to her body.” A few seconds earlier, a young Japanese woman had pressed her nose to the glass. “See, that’s a Margiela sweater,” Cunningham said, indicating what appeared to be a few stray white yarns on the back of the woman’s cardigan. “It’s his label. He just uses stitches.”
Haute couture, of which Cunningham has rabbinical knowledge, is appealing to him insofar as it attracts the most fluent speakers of fashion, which he, and his admirers, consider a sort of social language. “He is able to show us who we are before we’re able to see it,” Linda Fargo said, when we spoke last fall. “No sooner does Bill call it a trend—observe it, organize it, and publish it—than it’s a trend. The real news of the week was the aggressive footwear. I’m kind of bubbling and aerating it with our team, and boom!”—Cunningham’s column the following Sunday featured a montage of mostly black high heels and boots, studded and strapped like those of a stampede of dominatrices. In October, a few years ago, Cunningham noticed, on his daily rounds, that an unusual number of women were carrying enormous—practically Hefty-size—tote bags embellished with geometric patterns. “I thought, My God, what’s going on?” he recalled. “You see, the story was the handbags were becoming more elaborate and heavier and heavier, and apparently Goyard, a hundred-year-old French firm, was able to develop a canvas coated with lacquer that was durable, lightweight, and could hold lots of stuff. There’s got to be a reason when a lot of people buy things.”
Cunningham is as attuned to the bourgeois as he is to the avant-garde, and the mundane accessories of day-to-day life are as exalted in his photographs as any platform shoe or deconstructed bustle. Balaclavas, shown in collage, hint at the martial aspect of New York street life. An umbrella, flipped inside out by the wind, becomes an abstract sculpture; a snow poncho, wrapped around its wearer’s head, is a plastic exoskeleton that will eventually be shed. He is drawn to anything natural: children, gardens, parks, animals. (His column has featured a parrot, a duck, a python, a monkey, a tortoise, and many dogs; not long ago, he took a train all the way back to Long Island when he realized that some black irises he had just seen at Old Westbury Gardens perfectly echoed the filigreed lines of both a 1900 cut-velvet Worth gown and some nearby wrought-iron gates.) He has a thing for curbside puddles. “It’s a little ridiculous, but a fierce snowstorm is wonderful!” he said. “Oh, it’s marvellous—it just rearranges the whole fashion scene when the wind blows down from the top of the Avenue. Six-, seven-hundred-dollar shoes, and they’re all in the slush—hey, it’s pretty peculiar!” He went on, “Nothing like a good blizzard, kid, and you got pictures!”
Among the sort of people who know they are wearing noteworthy outfits it is considered poor form—and, moreover, bad luck—to acknowledge that Cunningham is taking one’s picture, to blow his pose of invisibility. “If you see him, proper etiquette is just be yourself, but keep moving forward,” Linda Fargo said. For a civilian, though, opening the Sunday paper and finding that the way she looked, on the way to a dental appointment, or to the grocery store, was pleasing to Cunningham can be a thrilling experience, like opening the mailbox to find a love letter from a suitor she didn’t know existed.
“I’m so excited that my picture is in here!” a woman exclaimed, in front of the Bergdorf windows, pointing to an almost unintelligible figure in one of the blown-up columns. “You made my life. I’m in the pink earmuffs—I just wish I had looked better.”
Cunningham nodded politely, but said little. As soon as he could, he scampered off down the sidewalk to snap a picture of a matron, on her husband’s elbow, in a yellow-and-black checkerboard suit.
“The season is changing, but it’s more than change of season,” he said, when he returned. “It’s how fashion will reflect the financial changes. Fashion, the people wearing it, will do it before they even know what they’re doing. You don’t know yet, it’s just starting to gel, but there will be a style. You watch, you’ll see something. There’s the old saw about hemlines. Who knows? It’s only in the future you can know. You just have to stay out on the street and get it. It’s all here.” ♦
