(Image: Instagram/JustinTheroux)
This past weekend, we mourned the loss of another legend: Bill Cunningham, the great fashion photographer who spent 40 years chronicling the ever-changing trends and fads of fashion.
After his time in the Korean war, Bill started his career as a fashion reporter for the Chicago Tribune and then later worked for Women’s Wear Daily.
“At the Times, his street-fashion column ‘On the Street’, begun in 1978, was a mainstay of the style section. Almost always dressed in a bright blue jacket, Bill, an iconic figure who travelled by bicycle, made his name traversing New York’s city blocks with a camera hanging from his neck.
“We all dress for Bill,” Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has said. The New Yorker dubbed his recurring feature as, “New York’s high-school yearbook; an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked. 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.” (USA Today).
In 2010, a documentary film about the iconic cycling photographer came to fruition and became an unusual craze. Bill, as depicted in the documentary, humble as always, claimed to his death that he had never nor would watch it, according to the Times.
His obituary really describes him best:
He didn’t go to the movies. He didn’t own a television. He ate breakfast nearly every day at the Stage Star Deli on West 55th Street, where a cup of coffee and a sausage, egg and cheese could be had until very recently for under $3. He lived until 2010 in a studio above Carnegie Hall amid rows and rows of file cabinets, where he kept all of his negatives. He slept on a single-size cot, showered in a shared bathroom and, when he was asked why he spent years ripping up checks from magazines like Details (which he helped Annie Flanders launch in 1982), said: “Money’s the cheapest thing. Liberty and freedom is the most expensive.”
Over the weekend, tributes from friends and fans, from people Like Naomi Campbell and Iris Apfel to various designers, started pouring in:
A photo posted by Iris Apfel (@iris.apfel) on
A photo posted by Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) on
RIP Bill Cunningham. A legend. We are heartbroken. His creative spirit and presence has forever impacted our artistic community.
— RODARTE (@OfficialRodarte) June 25, 2016
At Cindy Sherman’s MOMA opening, Bill Cunningham swooped in snapped my gloves saying “Oh aren’t these marvelous!” Never felt so well dressed
— Molly Ringwald (@MollyRingwald) June 25, 2016
#RIP Bill Cunningham pic.twitter.com/kGGqYeI9ml
— Marc Jacobs (@marcjacobs) June 25, 2016
RIP Bill Cuningham legendary NY Times photographer loved by all in fashion & beyond #rip #BillCunningham pic.twitter.com/Z3DBTUT2OS
— Iman Abdulmajid (@The_Real_IMAN) June 25, 2016