FASHION CLIMBING by BILL CUNNINGHAM : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

 

 Bill Cunningham discovered he liked to wear girl's dresses when he was a boy and an errant parent tried to beat the girl out of him. What he loved was beauty. He was destined to work in fashion and his first preoccupation, circa the 1940's was to be a milliner - a designer of hats - which went on until 1960 when hats went out of fashion in favor of showing hair. By the time he died in 2016 at the age of 87, Cunningham was best known as a photographer who was on the streets of New York as well as anywhere fashion was being made, worn, modeled.  His overall work is sometimes thought of as "fashion anthropology," a documentation of that world and how it translates to the people. What no one knew as that he had been working on a memoir.  The writing was found after his death and "Fashion Climbing" is the result.

In life, he eventually worked for the New York Times : Let's link to what the New York Time obituary column had to say about him:

NEW YORK TIMES : BILL CUNNINGHAM FASHION DESIGNER - OBIT

Excerpt:  In 2008, Mr. Cunningham went to Paris, where the French government bestowed the Legion of Honor on him.  In New York, he was celebrated at Bergdorf Goodman, where a life-sized mannequin of him was installed in the window.

It was the New York Landmarks Conservancy that made him a living landmark in 2009, the same year The New Yorker, in a profile, described is On the Street and Evening Hours columns as the city's unofficial yearbook: "an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked."

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The illustration on the cover of the book is one that Cunningham used to advertise his hats.  For years, even while inducted into the Korean War and stationed in France, he hand made highly original and creative hats, sensing trends years ahead of time.  As an artist he struggled to earn. His personal endurance is a story of both dogged determination and living by his wits, as well as having been the recipient of kindnesses. He also got ripped off in the fashion business and makes it sound like putting up with less creative types stealing is how its done. Buyers would return from shows with a few purchases and turn them over for mass production. He tells about the kind of women who could afford to pay, the women who got free clothing to advertise it, the women who were loaned clothing, the women who never intended to pay at all. The most conservative women, those who followed trends if the Duchess of WIndsor was wearing it, were too cautious to entertain wearing some of his creations, yet other designers and stores knocked off his designs.

Bill was not a designer of clothing but as an observer he was sensitive to cut and fabric, what made a dress move with the wearer and what made a dress obviously off a rack, and he was a valuable consultant to the owners of  the then only custom clothing house for the most elegant, Chez Ninon, who didn't become known until FIrst Lady Jackie Kennedy came calling.

As a keep observer, Bill Cunningham moved into fashion journalism and photography.

However, the retelling of his stories is lighthearted and sometimes truly funny and had me LOL. So while this book is about his place in the fashion world,  it strikes me that he has no bitterness, and I can imagine him laughing as he wrote those passages himself.  I'm reminded that there are rewards besides money and that to remain true to oneself requires sacrifices.

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