Bill Cunningham – Insight

Bill Cunningham famously offered the following insight into his life and worldview as one of the fashion world’s most beloved touchstones and reluctant social icons:

“The wider world perceives fashion as frivolity that should be done away with in the face of social upheavals—problems that are enormous. The point is in fact that fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you can do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization.”

After dropping out of Harvard and his milliner aspirations, he eventually landed at The New York Times as a fashion photographer and journalist credited with kickstarting the now ubiquitous and seminal street-fashion phenomena with his weekly column On The Street.

Since then, he photographed anyone and everyone in the fashion world, provided of course that he found them interesting.

“I’m not interested in celebrities with their free dresses. Look at the clothes, the cut, the silhouette, the color. It’s the clothes. Not the celebrity and not the spectacle.”

So great was his disdain for the growing disconnection between fashion and daily life that he lived in a very small apartment modified specifically to house his expansive physical archive. He refused limousines, opting only for his bicycle whenever possible. And it wasn’t until very late into his career that he adopted digital cameras because the workflow demanded it.

“If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do, kid.”

For Bill, it all came down to creativity. Whether he realized it or not, he was foundational in motivating personal style as a direct output of artistic expression for millions of people around the world. Bill was an artist, after all. And to him, creativity meant more than ephemeral trends. It meant changing a game that was, in his mind, stacked against us all.

“A lot of people have taste, but they don’t have the daring to be creative.”

The New York Times published a new article written by some of the people who knew him best, link in bio. In it you can see some of Bill’s seminal images for the Times and their impact on today’s culture.