Fashion Climbing: A Memoir With Photographs
(Penguin, $27) Bill Cunningham was a New York City institution, said Angela Ledgerwood in Esquire.com. If you spent any time strolling on Fifth Avenue in the past four decades, you were likely to stumble upon the New York Times fashion photographer stopping “an exquisitely or outrageously dressed fashionista” to snap her picture for the Sunday Styles pages. But Cunningham, despite his big smile, outgoing personality, and large devoted following, was so private a man that even his family had no idea he’d written a memoir until it was discovered among his papers after his death two years ago. A “captivating” read, “it will reinvigorate the way you see the world.”
Fashion Climbing can seem at times “like the most guileless thing ever written,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Focused on the author’s upbringing and his early, midcentury years in the fashion busi-
ness, it bubbles with enthusiasm and language so dated, it’s “reminiscent of Archie comic books.” Yet much of the material, “in a less buoyant writer’s hands,” could easily have been presented as tragic. At age 4, Cunningham tells us, he was beaten by his middle-class Boston mother when she discovered him trying on his sister’s dress. But neither his parents nor the Army—Cunningham reports wowing his Korean War comrades with his skill at camouflaging helmets with flowers—could stifle his interest in fashion, and after stints at top department stores, he graduated from college and set himself up in New York as a maker of women’s hats. His insights on style, beginning with hats, turn Fashion Climber into a “shy little primer, a Strunk and White of chic.”
Cunningham is “a bit of an unreliable narrator,” said Robin Givhan in The Washington Post. Thwarted by his shield of cheerfulness, we never do learn his sexual orientation and are left guessing how much he was ostracized as a young man for his fashion obsession. But we can see why he was recruited into fashion journalism, because he’s an astute observer of its rules and mores. “He doesn’t dig far below the surface. But downward is not where Cunningham ever cast his gaze.”