Upbeat look at fashion

FASHION CLIMBING: A MEMOIR WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

By Bill Cunningham Penguin Press Robin Givhan The memoir that photographer Bill Cunningham left – edited, typed and with a suggested title – offers a glimpse into the fashion world of the 1950s, when the industry was endowed with outsize importance in the lives of women and its rules were sacrosanct.

Fashion was a kind of religion

– or perhaps a cult – filled with committed converts and lifelong true believers, as well as agnostics who couldn’t break free. Cunningham fell into all three tribes.

Fashion Climbing is a narrow slice of Cunningham’s life story, from his childhood in a “middle-class Catholic home in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston”, through his time as a successful milliner in New York, until he takes his first steps into journalism at Women’s Wear Daily. Fashion Climbing is about his life as William J, the fashion-obsessed young man who ditched his last name so as not to embarrass his straitlaced family with his artsy tendencies.

The book was found after

Cunningham’s death in 2016, so it’s unclear when he finished it. It’s not so much the language that places his memoir in time, but rather its tenor. It’s upbeat and chirpy – free of today’s irony and angst-ridden navel-gazing.

The 21st century forces that have transformed the industry would probably have brought out more of Cunningham’s bite. And to be sure, his teeth could be sharp.

“Like any business, there are the small group of lovely, wellmannered customers who make life worth living. Unfortunately, 65% of the women buying high fashion act like star-spangled bitches, never satisfied, and full of conniving tricks to get the price as low as possible, demanding the best quality and three times more service.”

Cunningham’s memoir is a marvellous glimpse into the fashion world as New York was coming into its own. It’s hard to believe anyone had as lovely a time as Cunningham did when he was in the army, stationed in France during the Korean War. He adorned his helmet with flowers; he hid fashion magazines in his locker. He spent much of the war giving hat-making lessons to the wives of officers.

As a milliner in New York, he raves about the young and stylish; he can barely stomach the society matrons. He indulges his creativity with overthe-top locations for his hat shows, delights in creating a near stampede of guests for one of his presentations and complains when the press fails to find his work as fabulous as he believes it to be. Eventually, women stop wearing hats, and Cunningham closes his business.

He was an astute observer of the social ecosystem. Amid the wealthy ladies, the snobbery and hierarchies, he laments the way in which fashion can be used to demean, ostracise and otherwise devalue people.

He is not diplomatic; he offers no safe space. “It’s a ridiculous belief that money brings taste; it definitely doesn’t. As a matter of fact, it often merely allows one to enjoy bad taste with louder vulgarity.” Robin Givhan is The Washington Post’s fashion critic