Dear Friend,
This documentary is about the “most important man in the world,” and you have never heard of him! What could be better? This film is a touching biography of a lovely old man in love with his work, New York, and its people. He’s an eighty-year-old eccentric fashion photographer who rides his bicycle through the streets of downtown Manhattan to shoot pedestrian New Yorkers in all their native splendor. Whether they be attired in dyed fur and denim, leather and feathers or African animal prints, Bill Cunningham has captured this untamed species of sauntering sophisticates in their jungle habitat for some fifty years now. He is a hunter with big game to shoot and the hunt is still on. If anyone can claim to have “seen it all” it is the indomitable and irrepressible Bill Cunningham.
Bill Cunningham has been a fashion-photojournalist for so long, he knows everyone in art, fashion, and society in New York – and they know him. His self-effacing bonhomie and his dogged determination to document and memorialize New Yorkers and their fashion trends have won him a unique respect and admiration in the city, as he dodges death-defying traffic to get to his next photo shoot for The New York Times. It could be a swank benefit for the New York City Ballet, Mrs. Astor’s 100th birthday party (they’re old friends) or two black girls threatening to break his camera if he takes their picture. (He takes the picture and smiles.) They are all the same to him. People either have style or they don’t. He’s not interested in “celebrities with their free dresses.” For someone who is not a name dropper, he has no problem naming names. (Apparently, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe had no style.) He has been called the “ultimate egalitarian” in a city described by the all white-wearing writer Thomas Wolfe as being “all about status.”
There are plenty of celebrities and notable freaks of fashion in this documentary. It is a social column in itself of the notable and the notorious. Making appearances were society swells: the late Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Oscar de la Renta, Mr. David Rockefeller, and Dr. Henry Kissinger. (I must have missed Nancy – she always looks great.) Then we had the fashion professionals: editor Anna Wintour (the Devil Wears Prada herself), ex-supermodel Carmen Dell’Orefice, Met costume curator Harold Koda, and textile executive and style-icon extraordinaire Iris Apfel. By far the most amusing people were the fashion eccentrics: “the Dandy” Patrick McDonald, ex-Nepali diplomat Shail Upadhya, drag queen Kenny Kenny (with her inspired painted-on veil), and from Paris the incomparable Anna Piaggi. You won’t find these characters in your hometown and you won’t find their clothes there either. These are serious stylists making serious personal statements about whom and what they are through their apparel. Ignore them at your peril! These people are fierce!
Bill Cunningham witnessed great change in the fashion business in the past sixty years having been a fashion writer, milliner, and lastly photographer. When he started in the 1950s, fashion was tightly controlled industry. Rich women who were serious about their wardrobe went to Paris twice a year to select their garments at any one of the numerous fashion houses to be personally fitted. It was said that a single fitting at Balenciaga was like five or six fittings anywhere else. Five or six fittings?! Yup! These women had time on their hands. Fashion editor and Met costume curator Diana Vreeland once had a lingerie shop in London where women would come in for two fittings for a single slip! A small clique of Paris couturiers, amongst them Dior, Chanel, Ricci, Balmain, Fath, Schiaparelli, and Saint Laurent, determined what fashionable women of the Western world would look like. This meant that twice a year American designers and fashion journalists would trek to Paris to see the collections to copy the styles and promote the new looks. As the world became more democratic in the 1960s, the street became the arbiter of fashion. People told Paris what they were going to wear and it was up to Paris to adopt their stylish innovations. This is where Bill Cunningham found his niche in the fashion world – by becoming the world’s greatest trend spotter, “the most important man in the world.”
What Bill Cunningham did not become was a stylist himself. While everyone in New York knows Bill, no one seems to know anything about him. No one seems to know where he came from, if he has a family or where he lives. Despite covering the glamorous and powerful for years, Bill lives an ascetic almost monastic life above Carnegie Hall in an apartment with no kitchen or bathroom (that’s down the hall). His sole piece of furniture is a make-shift cot that is lodged between tight rows of gray metal file cabinets that contain his life’s work of photographs, negatives, and publications. His “closet” consists of a few articles of clothing on metal hangers hung from the handles of file drawers. All that he eats comes from fast food restaurants or cafes. A bachelor, he has few friends, and goes to church every Sunday. He shuns the comforts and distractions of the material world in order to pursue his art. To call him a workaholic would be facile. He is a completely committed artist to the exclusion of (almost) all else. It is this approach to life that makes Bill Cunningham such a special, fascinating, and endangered species.
Here’s the trailer: http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/billcunninghamnewyork/trailer.html
From the vault: Funny Face (1957). Directed by Stanley Donen; written by Leonard Gershe; staring Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Kay Thompson. Talk about what the fashion industry used to be! Two of principals are supposed to be Richard Avedon, and Diana Vreeland (funny face). Kay Thompson was the voice coach and “special friend” of Judy Garland. This movie also has uber-super-duper models Dovima, Suzy Parker, and Sunny Hartnett. (How much glamour can one stand?)
Best of luck in your movie selections. Your faithful friend,
Dwight Dekeyser
© 2011 Dwight Dekeyser, Esq. All rights reserved.
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