Avante Guard(e) - why you must watch Bill Cunningham New York
Bill Cunningham New York is a subtly atypical documentary, both a reflection and admiration of its subject Here, we have every aspect associated with documentaries – talking heads, cameras tracking the subject, raw footage – yet director Richard Press rearranges and warps these elements to produce an altogether unexpected product. The film is narrative yet non-chronological, casual yet reverential, light and joyful yet focused. In short, the film captures the essence of the most paradoxical Bill Cunningham, and how this idiosyncratic nature created a master of street fashion photography. Press frames Cunningham’s photography as the manifestation of his life, resisting the compartmentalization of artisan and craft. Over forty years, Bill Cunningham has defined street fashion with unparalleled avidity and, in consequence, has let his love for New York City’s street fashion define himself.
Among a sea of interviews with the New York fashion elite, longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour states with a wry smile, “We all dress for Bill.” Through these interviews, we soon learn that in every corner of the fashion world – icon Patrick McDonald, historian Iris Apfel, model Carmen Dell’Orefice – Bill’s work is revered as an “encapsulation of fashion…of New York life”. Press’s depiction of these talking heads smartly parallels Bill’s approach towards his own photos’ subjects: interviewees pose in full body shots set against individual backdrops rather than a standard facial close-up, displaying the person’s style and life as a whole within the picture. They are talking humans, rather than just talking heads. The personal and zany touch of Bill’s work finds its mirror in other smart details of Press’s direction. A rapid pace embodies the frantic speed of Bill’s life, quickly shifting between shots of his daily course. We watch Bill biking to and fro different neighborhoods, offices, and the archives in his cramped Carnegie Hall studio, all while small bits of jolly jazz music play in the background, a cinematic representation of Bill’s ever-so upbeat personality brimming with joie de vivre. Expansive shots of the rushing city and its mountainous buildings register the backdrop of Bill’s life as New York itself. Placing the two entities of city and man side by side within both title and footage, Press suggests, along with Bill’s peers, that Bill is more than just a chronicler of New York’s street fashion – he is a timekeeper of the city’s spirit.
Accordingly, Press carefully constructs his film to personify the most remarkable aspect of Bill: his selflessness. With extensive footage of his colleagues and his photographs, one can wonder why a biopic focuses so much on Bill’s subjects rather than Bill himself. Yet by centering on the craft over the man, Press captures the modesty underlying Bill’s artistic approach. Street fashion photography may define Bill’s identity, but the last thing ever considered in Bill’s photography is Bill himself. Wary of holding any “preconceived notion” of trends, Bill believes his subjects possess an inherent artistic beauty - as best summarized by Bill, “It’s not what I think, it’s what I see...I don’t decide anything, I let the street speak to me...”. Bill never tries to stamp his originality on his work – he claims to be more a “journalistic photographer” rather than an “artist” - and neither does Press with his film. With very little personal interaction, the film treats Bill as a painting to be viewed rather than touched. The informal footage simply places a thin frame around its subject, aiming to “take notes with the camera” rather than paint over what it captures. For both men, it is the subject, rather than the documentor, who must guide the final product. Both Press and Bill believe in the intrinsic beauty of their chosen subject. And Bill is, indeed, a beautiful, humble, most thoughtful human being. No matter a person’s class, family, background, or age, Bill will take one’s photo so long as the clothes intrigue him. He works from the lower East Side to the swankiest soiree, yet he treats every person with a consistent and charming benevolence. And while he captures the city’s most elegant individuals, he always wears the same old blue jacket and khaki pants - this is the man who claimed, “Who the hell wants a kitchen and a bathroom?” upon learning about the inevitable loss of his meager Carnegie Hall studio. The fashion world’s assumed materiality has no impact on Bill’s work - his aesthetic passion alone drives him to the streets everyday.
The scenes of Bill dashing across perilous intersections just to photograph a lady’s outfit are charming in effect. But Press subtly uses these moments to highlight Bill’s subject choice. Bill’s work is obviously not the documentation of a runway show, where all outfits are planned by a singular, professional mind - uncontrived pictures of New York citizens mostly comprise his archives. So what draws a fashion photographer like Bill to random civilians more than a formal designer collection or celebrity? Press had an answer in a Forbes magazine interview, stating,
“…[Bill’s] singular in the sense that he’s been documenting the intersection of fashion and society and culture in New York for the past 50 years….If you want to know what New York is like and how we lived... you look at his archives. He’s not just documenting how people dress, he’s documenting who we are through the way we dress….It’s really cultural anthropology.”
Cultural anthropology – a complex phrase to connect with a practice that many deem superficial, even narcissistic. But what is fashion if not how we choose for the world to see us? And what is more profound than self-creation? Bill sees beyond the skin-deep layer of spectacle that most people associate with the fashion world, even stating in a grainy 1980’s film interview, “…fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you could do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization”. To him, style is the greatest medium for creating who we are as a society, as individuals - it acts as a representative of human character and culture.
Fashion is not just the means to cover the body in the most visually pleasing way – if it were so, then a person’s clothing would be whittled down to one silhouette or article that perfectly shapes their figure. Instead, we use fashion to convey multiple layers of representation, whether it be our inner self, socio-economic class, or culture-determined formalities. Press does not only support the magnitude of Bill’s work as a fashion photographer but also his belief in this role of civilian fashion art, showcasing the expansive scope of humanity captured in Bill’s archives. Patrick MacDonald, a renowned stylist of New York, states in the film, “We’re all...blank canvases… everyday, we paint ourselves”. It is this depiction of every human as a potential artist and fashion the art that makes Bill Cunningham’s work so joyfully received and respected. In this light, it now makes perfect sense that Press depicts Bill as a “journalist” with pictures rather than an “artist” (“Bill”). In adopting Bill’s view of fashion as anthropology over decoration, one can appreciate his photography as the archiving of cultural touchstones, not fleeting trends.
As with all discussions of fashion’s cultural implications, I am reminded of a particular scene in the film “The Devil Wears Prada” (yes, that scene). When Anne Hathaway, playing the naive personal assistant to Meryl Streep’s beyond-chic fashion editor, softly snickers at a stylist anxiously choosing between two similar belts, Streep delivers the “Cerulean” speech, a monologue to end all monologues. In the most threatening soft tones, Streep berates Hathaway’s ignorance in thinking she’s above the perceived superficiality of the fashion industry. Looking over Hathaway’s dumpy blue sweater, Streep drags her to the ground, claiming her clothes “tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back”. And besides? Her attempt to supersede fashion is futile. The sweater’s shade of blue trickled down from a past cerulean Oscar de la Renta collection. Even a cheap Gap shirt operates as fashion, whether she likes it or not. Bill, like Miranda, recognizes this web that weaves together all clothing with self-identification and culture, and his photography serves as a platform to immortalize this concept. As Press hopes to share through Bill’s story, our self-created appearance will always function as a symbol of individual and societal influences, no matter our level of interest or perception of its purpose.
In the film, Metropolitan Costume Institute Curator Harold Koda argues that Bill is the one person who “covers the spectrum of who we are as New Yorkers” through the lens of fashion by maintaining his two fashion columns – “The City a la mode” for formal events, and “On the Street” for street fashion. Looking at Bill’s photographs - women in faded jeans, billowy dresses, leopard prints, raincoats, on and on - the photos are a living representation of the city’s great array of citizen’s and their artistry. Though the outfits may vastly differ, the spirit underneath each personal aesthetic ties the subjects together into a grand collage of city life. Watching footage of the city streets and Bill at work, we witness a wide spread of New York citizens, from socialites to secretaries - it is a new appreciation of the city’s great melting pot of people, another anthropological portrayal of the subjects that Bill loves.
One quick but intriguing moment in the film steps outside the informal, representative format the film employs - when Press asks Bill about his romantic past. It is one of the rare times the camera abandons its distance and personally interacts with Bill. He is left wordless, his mouth frozen in its signature grin. When his coworkers are questioned about his personal life, they similarly have no answers. There were no lovers for Bill because that hole was filled by another – his photography, the only great love of his life. With Bill’s ambiguous answer, Press leaves the topic alone, focusing back on the side of Bill that Bill prefers to discuss - his work. It is within this intimate moment one most realizes how the film presents Bill in an anthropological manner. Bill is arguably greater than a common photographer - his unyielding dedication and enthusiasm for street fashion have placed him beyond the ordinary. It is for these qualities that Press chose to portray Bill as an extraordinary standout of the human population, a man that has become truly cohesive with his craft. It may be a thin frame that Press constructs around Bill, but it is a frame nonetheless, one that mainly marks its creator’s attempt to provide a heightened record of its subject’s own self-portrayal: Bill, the original New York street fashion photographer. Not the lover, not the friend, but the street fashion photographer. Bill Cunningham is presented as Bill Cunningham New York because that is how Bill wishes to be seen - thus, that is how Press portrays him through over a decade worth of footage. The rest is, for the most part, left out of the picture, just as Bill’s photography only frames an outfit in the context of its time. We shall never know where that photographed lady in the red heels may be running to, but we shall always have a permanent record of her constructed appearance that day, the facet of herself she wishes for us to see. Perhaps that is why Bill finds fashion fascinating. It is a method of building the personal “armor” he knows only too well, shielding the aspects of our identity that we do not want to reveal and enhancing what we favor. As Press and Bill both realize, to truthfully capture humans’ need for self-created identity, we must choose what part of our subject to highlight, and perhaps more importantly, what to leave aside. If we ignore the subject’s self-expression, we lose the essence of the subject as a human, the protection we build (through fashion or other means) to guard ourselves against the world. Stripped of our identity for the sake of someone else’s artistic interpretation, we are naked. With our identities as shields, we can brave the world one day at a time, just like Bill.