Reading into Bill’s life
‘Fashion Climbing’, by the late photographer, found after his death in 2016, is now published
Like a pair of pearl earrings from Tiffany’s, Bill Cunningham’s posthumous memoir arrives as if in a small blue box. It’s an unexpected gift. Cunningham, for many years the fashion and society photographer for The New
York Times, left it behind when he died in 2016. Apparently no one knew he’d written it.
It’s a curiosity, for sure. It’s mostly about the fashion world of the late 1940s through the early ‘60s, when Cunningham was a hat designer and party crasher in Manhattan.
Fashion Climbing seems to have been written not long after that era, to judge by its language, which is reminiscent of Archie comic books and moony teenagers sharing a malted milkshake in 1957.
“Too swell for words”; “a real dilly”; “I thought I’d have pups”; “weekends were a hoot”; “the most super place in the world”; “you’d drop your teeth”; “you’d just die”; “putting on the dog”; “a real lulu.” Who writes like this? Cunningham does.
At times, Fashion Climbing can seem like the most guileless thing ever written and its author slightly touched in the head, in a kind and upbeat Forrest Gump sort of way. As you move forward in this time capsule of a book, though, you begin to realise that there was also a drop of Andy Warhol in the young Cunningham. Behind the boyish enthusiasm and well-scrubbed good looks, he could be a cool observer of the passing scene.
This memoir begins when its author was four. His Catholic, middle-class family lived in a suburb of Boston. His mother caught him trying on his sister’s prettiest dress and “beat the hell out of me, and threatened every bone in my uninhibited body if I wore girls’ clothes again.”
One of the odd, and oddly moving, aspects of Fashion Climbing is that much of this material, in a less buoyant writer’s hands, could be presented as tragedy. Cunningham’s parents tried to cure him of what they deemed to be his unmanly nature by sending him to trade school. How did he cope? He began to make elegant spindlelegged tables. “Everything I made had curlicues and twists,” he writes. His creations were coveted or, to put it in Billspeak, “a howling success.”
He was drafted into the army, not always a congenial place for men who like curlicues and twists. Seemingly within minutes, he writes, “I was the star of the camouflage manoeuvres,” his helmet covered with a “dazzling garden of flowers and grass.” When forced to march for hours, he pretended to be holding not a rifle but a bouquet of ostrich feathers. A general had him give classes to the officers’ wives in hatmaking.
I am getting ahead of myself in terms of Cunningham’s life. He worked in department stores in high school, including Bonwit Teller, at the time Boston’s most soignee retailer. The store sent him to train in Manhattan (“nothing was the same after the razzle-dazzle of New York”) and later to Harvard on a scholarship.
He had no knack for academia and dropped out. He went back to New York and became a milliner, making exotic hats and charming society ladies. He sold his wares under the designation William J, dropping his last name so as not to embarrass his family, still in shock that their son was a pusher of frilly things.
There is much to learn in this memoir about hatmaking.
What this book is really about, though, is purposeful looking. Cunningham lived to observe beautiful women and their clothes. When he wasn’t invited to opera openings and the grandest fetes, he sneaked in. “Today I can hardly find my way through the legitimate entrance of the Waldorf,” he writes, “but I could take you blindfolded through all the fire exits and kitchens leading to the ballroom.”
He was egalitarian, to a degree. Too much wallowing in luxury made him want to be back home in his monkish apartment. In what might be the best line in the book, in its awareness that style is not merely the dominion of the tall, the tawny, the Lorelei-like, the living clothes hangers with widely divided eyes, he writes: “A servant can have superb taste in tying her apron.”
He later became a fashion journalist, working for
Women’s Wear Daily and other outlets. This memoir does not take him as far as his career at The Times, nor does it delve into the start of his interest in photography.
Did anyone really know Cunningham? He famously lived a somewhat monastic life. As he puts it near the close of this book: “The only way to last is never to let anyone really know you.”