Bill Cunningham Hilton Als Popular Books

Bill Cunningham Hilton Als Biography & Facts

William John Cunningham Jr. (March 13, 1929 – June 25, 2016) was an American fashion photographer for The New York Times, known for his candid and street photography. A Harvard University dropout, he first became known as a designer of women's hats before moving on to writing about fashion for Women's Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune. He began taking candid photographs on the streets of New York City, and his work came to the attention of The New York Times with a 1978 capture of Greta Garbo in an unguarded moment. Cunningham reported for the paper from 1978 to 2016. Cunningham was hospitalized for a stroke in New York City in June 2016 and died soon after. Early life and education William John Cunningham Jr. was born into an Irish Catholic family and raised in Boston. He never lost his Boston accent. He had two sisters and a younger brother. His parents were religious and used corporal punishment. He had his first exposure to the fashion world as a stockboy in Bonwit Teller's Boston Store. He later said his interest in fashion began in church: "I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I'd be concentrating on women's hats." After attending Harvard University on scholarship for two months, he dropped out in 1948 and moved to New York City at the age of 19, where he worked again at Bonwit Teller, this time in the advertising department. Not long after, he quit his job and struck out on his own, making hats under the name "William J". He was drafted during the Korean War and was stationed in France, where he had his first exposure to French fashion. After serving a tour in the U.S. Army, he returned to New York in 1953 and his work as a milliner. In 1958, a New York Times critic wrote that he had "cornered the face-framing market with some of the most extraordinarily pretty cocktail hats ever imagined". He also worked for Chez Ninon, a couture salon that made line-for-line duplicates of designs by Chanel, Givenchy, and Dior. His clients in the 1950s included Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, Rebekah Harkness, and future First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier. Encouraged by his clients, he started writing, first for Women's Wear Daily and then for the Chicago Tribune. He closed his hat shop in 1962. Following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy sent Cunningham a red Balenciaga suit she had bought at Chez Ninon. He dyed it black and she wore it to the funeral. Career Cunningham contributed significantly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine Alaïa and Jean Paul Gaultier. While working at Women's Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune, he began taking candid photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. He was a self-taught photographer. He took one such photograph of Greta Garbo, though he later said he had not recognized her while photographing her nutria coat: "I thought: 'Look at the cut of that shoulder. It's so beautiful.' All I had noticed was the coat, and the shoulder." In 1977, Cunningham contributed a photo style feature to the SoHo Weekly News. He then published a group of impromptu pictures in the New York Times in December 1978, which soon became the regular series On the Street. His editor at the New York Times, Arthur Gelb, called these photographs "a turning point for the Times, because it was the first time the paper had run pictures of well-known people without getting their permission." Cunningham nevertheless joked about his role at the paper: "I'm just the fluff. I fill around the ads, if we have any." Although then-executive editor A. M. Rosenthal was virulently homophobic and consciously neglected coverage of the LGBT community during this period (precipitating editorial conflicts with the likes of fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg), Cunningham helped to subvert this stance by photographing a fundraising event in the Fire Island Pines in 1979 and letting the perceptive reader interpret his photos without verbal clues. Following Rosenthal's retirement from the role in 1988, Cunningham was able to integrate AIDS benefits, pride parades and Wigstock into his coverage. Cunningham's most notable columns in the Times, On the Street and Evening Hours, ran in the paper from February 26, 1989 until shortly before his death in 2016. For his society fashion column Evening Hours, he attended high society events such as the prestigious International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to select a few debutantes with the most fashionable, beautiful and elegant gowns to appear in his column. For On the Street, Cunningham photographed people and the passing scene in the streets of Manhattan, often at the corner Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, which The New York Times called Cunningham's "main perch". As he worked, his focus was on clothing as personal expression. He did not photograph people in the manner of paparazzi, preferring genuine personal style to celebrity. He once explained why he was not joining a group of photographers who swarmed around Catherine Deneuve: "But she isn't wearing anything interesting." Late in life he explained: "I am not fond of photographing women who borrow dresses. I prefer parties where women spend their own money and wear their own dresses.... When you spend your own money, you make a different choice." Instead, wrote Hilton Als in The New Yorker, "He loved 'the kids,' he said, who wore their souls on sleeves he had never seen before, or in quite that way." He was uninterested in those who showcased clothing they had not chosen themselves, which they modeled on the red carpet at celebrity events. Most of his pictures, he said, were never published. His fashion philosophy was populist and democratic: Fashion is as vital and as interesting today as ever. I know what people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they're horrified by what they see on the street. But fashion is doing its job. It's mirroring exactly our times. He wrote fashion criticism and published photo essays in Details, beginning with six pages in its first issue in March 1985 and rising to many more. He was part owner of the magazine for a time as well. His work there included an illustrated essay that showed similarities between the work of Isaac Mizrahi and earlier Geoffrey Beene designs, which Mizrahi called "unbelievably unfair and arbitrary". In an essay in Details in 1989, Cunningham was the first to apply the word "deconstructionism" to fashion. He also contributed two collection-review pieces to the 1991 inaugural year of Visionaire magazine. Designer Oscar de la Renta said: "More than anyone else in the city, he has the whole visual history of the last 40 or 50 years of New York. It's the total scope of fashion in the life of New York." He made a career taking unexpected photographs of everyday people, socialites and fashion personalities, many of whom valued his company. According to David Rockefeller, Brooke Astor asked that Cunningham attend her 10.... Discover the Bill Cunningham Hilton Als popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Bill Cunningham Hilton Als books.