Bill Cunningham, a legendary fashion photographer who spent decades chronicling the shifting tides of street fashion, died Saturday, according to the New York Times and the Associated Press. He was 87.
Almost always dressed in a bright blue jacket, Cunningham, an iconic figure who traveled by bicycle, made his name traversing New York's city blocks, a camera hanging from his neck. He worked for the Times for nearly 40 years, documenting decades of trends, fads and oddities.
Cunningham had been hospitalized recently after having a stroke, according to the Times.
Cunningham began his fashion career in millinery, recalls Vogue, and after he was drafted during the Korean war started his career in journalism as a fashion reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and later 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. In a 2002 interview with the paper, Cunningham said he always tried to be as discreet as possible because "you get more natural pictures that way."
“We all dress for Bill,” Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has said. TheNew Yorker dubbed Cunningham's recurring feature, "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."
Over the years, Cunningham became a fixture himself. In 2008, the French bestowed him with the Legion d’Honneur, and in 2009 he was named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
Then the film world came calling. In 2010, a documentary film about the photographer, Bill Cunningham New York, became a cult hit. According to the Times, he claimed until his death to have never watched it.
Perhaps this description from the Times' obituary 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.”
Tributes began to flood in as news of Cunningham's death spread. "RIP Bill Cuningham (sic) legendary NY Times photographer loved by all in fashion & beyond," tweeted the supermodel Iman. Designer Kenneth Cole tweeted, "He defined much of what we call #NYStyle. He was a devoted artist and style icon that will be missed..."
