Style hound: on the street with Bill Cunningham

ArtForum, March, 1996 by Guy Trebay

Stay a minute, child." Cunningham is outside the Gertrude tent at the semiannual fashion shows at Seventh on Sixth, snapping the picture of a woman in a pea jacket who's caught his eye. Moments ago he was deep in conversation with Esquire editor Woody Hochswender. Suddenly, midsentence, he was off. "The one main thing to Know about Bill is he's not going to be deterred," says Hochswender. "You could be having the most intense conversation of your life with him, and he'll see three women coming out of the tents wearing looks he wants and he's gone." When he catches up, the women are invariably happy to see him, to pose. Everyone in the fashion world seems to know Bill Cunningham; that is, they know and welcome, in the middle of the rugby scrum that passes for a journalistic corps at fashion shows, the steady and determined presence of this man whose name they may not, in every case, be able to conjure. "It's so easy for people to take Bill for granted," says Hochswender. "It's easy to overlook the fact that he's probably the best fashion journalist alive. Bill is on the street 30 hours a week. He's really obsessed."

I once made a study of Cunningham's movements, surreptitiously following him around town as he photographed pedestrians on 42nd Street on a chilly morning and then snapped society ladies outside Harry Winston's shop on 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, and later trained his lens on a charity party whose guests were mainly fashionable members of the gay bourgeoisie. Wherever he was, whether shooting the moneyed, or street kids, he moved in a hyperalert, scouting way that put me in mind of hunting hounds. "Bill has the eye," says Hochswender. "He watches the scene with great particularity. He really watches."

He does it with a dedication fanatic almost to the point of self-parody. People will tell you that Cunningham's a monk, an eccentric, an ascetic. When he covers European couture shows, for the New York Times, for example, it's well known that he pays his own airfare. While the rest of the fashion pack stays at the George V or the Crillon, Cunningham puts up in Les Halles lodgings where no one visits him, and where the phone is in the lobby, and where the bathroom is shared, and where he has the manager remove the mattress from its frame and then the frame from the room so that Cunningham can sleep in a corner on the floor. I have heard so often about Bill Cunningham's Spartan habits that when I hear his name I sometimes reflexively imagine St. Teresa sleeping on her bed of logs.

He once claimed to have bought no new clothes in 30 years. He is rumored to keep what few changes of dress he has on the hooks of the numerous file cabinets that line his living space, and says, "It's not that I'm not interested in clothes. Mine are functional-just camouflage-to blend in. I need clothes that make me invisible when I'm photographing." His philosophy is 'small upkeep, small worries." And he won't, in Bernadine Morris' words, "take nuttin'from nobody.' in a field where narcissism is institutional and self-promotion is fetishized, what draws notice to Cunningham is his ostentatious humility. "But you'll never know him," an old friend says. "You'll never know what he knows or what he has."