In the era of street style bloggers, Bill Cunningham stood out as the ultimate original. With his signature bicycle, blue jacket and smile, Cunningham, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, documented fashion history in his own way by capturing trends on the city street for the New York Times. And from lady who lunches to the passerby on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street and the chic Parisienne during the Collections season, everyone aspired to have their picture taken by him.
On Wednesday, July 6, with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s blessing, the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue was temporarily renamed after Cunningham, with New York’s First Lady, Chirlane McCray, in attendance during the unveiling ceremony.
“Fifth Avenue and 57th Street was Bill Cunningham’s spot,” said CFDA Chairwoman Diane von Furstenberg. “The world of fashion always knew that. Now, thanks to our Mayor, the world will know.”
“Bill Cunningham turned our sidewalks into runways and New Yorkers into models,” Mayor de Blasio noted. “His vivid photos captured our city’s diversity in every sense of the word, and helped define New York as the fashion capital of the world. Now, the corner that has long been known as Bill’s will officially be named for him – a fitting tribute for one of New York’s greats.”
Cunningham was the recipient of the CFDA’s Media Award in honor of Eugenia Sheppard in 1993. At the time, Bernadine Morris, another late fashion legend, penned a tribute to Cunningham for the CFDA Awards Journal, which CFDA.com is republishing here in his honor:
“Back in the days when some women still wore serious hats, a messenger brought some elaborately designed millinery by William J to Ruth Jacobs, fashion editor of Women’s Wear Daily. “I haven’t seen feathers worked this way since before the war in Paris,” she said to me. “Interview William J.”
“Can you tell me where I can find William J,” I asked the messenger, who looked about 16 years old.
“I am William J,” he answered amiably.
That was Bill Cunningham, before the camera. And no, he wasn’t aware of any French feather-working technique. “I just played with them with my fingers.”
Fewer women wore serious hats and William J closed his chandeliered salon in the Carnegie Hall building and took a bus tour of America before seeking his place in the fashion world.
Soon after his trip he visited John Fairchild at Women’s Wear Daily to tell him about a group of chic, elegant young women who had turned up the night before at a charity ball. The group included Isabelle Eberstadt, Judy Peabody and Joanne Muss. They wore short, fluffy sheer black dresses as I recall. I wrote the story and Kenneth Paul Block did the sketches, don’t ask how. Bill still didn’t have a camera.
Pretty soon, he began to write a column twice a week during which he discovered Harlem on Easter Sunday and a shop that specialized in dresses for the mothers of Bar Mitzvah boys on Pitkin Avenue in Brooklyn.
Since he indiscriminately only wrote the truth, his life as a columnist was limited. But never fear. He was quite employable.
He next worked as a New York fashion correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. One of the perks was trips to Europe, first for couture, then ready to wear. On one of them a brilliant British photographer named Harold Chapman who worked for the New York Times in Paris suggested it might be easier to take pictures than to make elaborate notes and he showed him how to do it. Now Bill Cunningham had his camera. The rest is history: the continuously manned station on the southwest corner of 57th street to catch the fashionables as they went to work, shop or lunch; the bicycle that took him uptown, downtown, all around the town quicker than limousine or subway; the record of late-20th century civilization through the way it is dressed. And the philosophy, “I am a camera.”
This, of course, is only the barest outline of what Bill Cunningham is. Unlike other chroniclers, his range is eclectic: patrician and plebeian, classic and inventive; any aspect of fashion is grist to his lens. New designer or old; established one; imaginative young person or sophisticated nonagenarian-he loves them all.
And behind it all, there is the man’s incredible integrity. Even his friends have trouble buying him a cup of coffee.
If he has a predecessor, it would be Weegee, the legendary free-lance photographer who prowled New York for news shots which often appeared in The Daily News.
Bill has also been a free-lancer for most of his working life. Just recently, because his friends pestered him, he signed on as a member of The New York Times. It’s not likely to change his way of doing business. Bill is original and he has his own agenda.
Don’t challenge him.”