Bill Cunningham New York

A lot of you may ask who is Bill Cunningham is. And let me just tell you – he was doing what Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, and Tommy Ton do a long time before they were able to pick up a camera.

Born in the late 1920s, Bill dropped out of Harvard University and ‘ran off’ to New York, and began working in advertising. Then there was his stint in the army, after that he moved back to New York and began writing for the Chicago Tribune, where he found an interest in fashion journalism. While working at the Tribune and at Women’s Wear Daily, he began taking photographs of fashion on the streets of New York. As the result of a chance photograph of Greta Garbo, he published a group of his impromptu pictures in the Times in December 1978, which soon became a regular series. Cunningham photographs people and the passing scene in the streets of Manhattan every day. Most of his pictures, he has said, are never published.

He, and street style photography are such a key thing to fashion today, that there has been a film made in his honour.

xo.