Among the many, many cabinets inside Bill Cunningham's apartment stuffed with a half century of street fashion.
"Fashion," says Bill Cunningham in the new documentary on his life, “it’s the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. But you can’t do away with it—that would be like doing away with civilization.”
That statement just about slayed me as I sat in the Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Wednesday night for the Costume Council-hosted L.A. premiere of Bill Cunningham New York, the first feature film by director Richard Press and his husband, producer Philip Gefter. It took the pair about a decade to get it done, they joked after the screening, eight to convince the fiercely independent, 83-year-old lensman who is considered the first street style photographer to let them point the camera on him and another two years to actually do the work.
An anthropologist with a Nikon (loaded with genuine film of the 35-mm, 400-speed variety!), Mr. Cunningham has been obsessively, enthusiastically, chronicling the way New Yorkers year-round (and in recent years, Parisiennes during Fashion Week there) dress in real life—from the sidewalks to the society galas. He hung up his hat as a fledgling milliner in the 1950s and took up a camera he received as gift and started using it as a pencil, as the friend who gifted this new creative tool recommended. But it is the many fans who have lapped up his work over the decades since then, across the pages of original Details magazine and The New York Times, who have benefited the most from his special gift as an archivist of clothes, style and, essentially, human nature.
Annie Flanders, who gave Mr. Cunningham literally more than a hundred pages at times in Details to share his findings with readers, was among us Wednesday. She arrived with a prized gift of her own from her dear old friend, a real mallard turned into a hand muff. It was so cold that it actually proved practical on this evening. Her old friend did not see the muff Wednesday night nor the film during its L.A. showing or New York premiere last week, or at all according to the filmmakers.
But there are so many of us influenced by the images that he created and that Annie gave a platform to in that magazine (long before Conde Nast bought it)—including those of us so moved at the screening, such as Cameron Silver of Decades, designers Jeremy Scott and Michael Schmidt, provocateur Constance, author Monica Corcoran, Americana historian Charles Phoenix and myself. As teens, we were able to thwack our way out of the conventional existence we were hovering in because we could see there was another way out there, that it was OK to realize our own sense of armor in this cuckoo existence called life.
Bill Cunningham New York opens over the next three months around the country. Do not miss it.
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