About

Early Life

William John Cunningham Jr.—March 13, 1929—was born into an Irish Catholic family in Boston, Massachusetts. The second eldest in a family of four, having two sisters and an older brother, he grew up in a strict religious household. Attending church every Sunday, his interest in fashion began as he said he “could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I'd be concentrating on women's hats."

After graduating from high school, he attended Harvard University on a scholarship for two months, where he dropped out in 1948 moving to New York City at the age of 19. After leaving a couple jobs, Cunningham decided he would work for himself making hats under the name “William J”. However, that didn’t last long either as he was drafted into the Korean War and stationed in France. It was there where he had his first exposure to French fashion.

Completing a tour in the U.S. Army, he returned to New York in 1953 and resumed his work as a milliner. In 1958, a New York Times critic wrote that he had "cornered the face-framing market with some of the most extraordinarily pretty cocktail hats ever imagined." Some of his clients in the 1950’s included Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, and future First Lady Jaqueline Bouvier. Closing his hat shop in 1962, he followed the encouragement of his clients and started writing—first for Women’s Wear Daily and then for the Chicago Tribune.

Career

Cunningham contributed significantly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine Alaïa and Jean Paul Gaultier. While working at Women's Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune, he began taking candid photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. He was a self-taught photographer. He took one such photograph of Greta Garbo, though he later said he had not recognized her while photographing her nutria coat: "I thought: 'Look at the cut of that shoulder. It's so beautiful.' All I had noticed was the coat, and the shoulder." He then published a group of impromptu pictures in the New York Times in December 1978, which soon became the regular series On the Street. His editor at the New York Times, Arthur Gelb, called these photographs "A turning point for the Times, because it was the first time the paper had run pictures of well-known people without getting their permission." He nevertheless joked about his role at the paper:

I'm just the fluff. I fill around the ads, if we have any.

He pioneered the paper's coverage of the gay community, photographing a fundraising event in the Fire Island Pines in 1979 letting the perceptive reader interpret his photos without verbal clues. By the 1990s, he integrated AIDS benefits, pride parades, and Wigstock into his coverage.

He wrote fashion criticism and published photo essays in Details, in which he was the first to apply to word "deconstructionism" to fashion. Design Oscar de la Renta said: "More than anyone else in the city, he has the whole visual history of the lasy 40 or to years of New York. It's the total scope of fashion in the life of New York." He made a career taking unexpected photographs of everday people, socialites and fashion personalities, many of whom valued his company.

Philosophy

Cunningham's most notable columns in the Times, On the Street and Evening Hours ran in the paper from February 26, 1989 until shortly before his death in 2016. For On the Street, Cunningham photographed people and the passing scene in the streets of Manhattan, often at the corner Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, which the New York Times called Cunningham's "main perch". As he worked, his focus was on clothing as personal expression. He did not photograph people in the manner of paparazzi, preferring genuine personal style to celebrity. He once explained why he was not joining a group of photographers who swarmed around Catherine Deneuve: "But she isn't wearing anything interesting." Late in life he explained: "I am not fond of photographing women who borrow dresses. I prefer parties where women spend their own money and wear their own dresses…When you spend your own money, you make a different choice." Instead, wrote Hilton Als in The New Yorker, "He loved 'the kids,' he said, who wore their souls on sleeves he had never seen before, or in quite that way." He was uninterested in those who showcased clothing they had not chosen themselves, which they modeled on the red carpet at celebrity events. Most of his pictures, he said, were never published. His fashion philosophy was populist and democratic:

Fashion is as vital and as interesting today as ever. I know what people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they're horrified by what they see on the street. But fashion is doing its job. It's mirroring exactly our times.

Legacy

Cunningham died age 87 in New York City on June 25, 2016, after being hospitalized for a stroke. His death was widely reported in both the fashion and the general press. Following his death, the Bergdorf Goodman department store created a display in its window memorializing Cunningham. Thousands signed an online petition requesting that the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th Street in New York City be renamed "Bill Cunningham Corner". In 2009, it was the New York Landmarks Conservancy that made him a living landmark, the same year The New Yorker, in a profile, described his On the Street and Evening Hours columns as the city’s unofficial yearbook: “an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked.”