Bill Cunningham the legendary street-style NY photographer whose brilliant weekly style essays in the The Times were de rigueur viewing, died today aged 87 years old. With his very sharp eye and keen sense of shifting trends he captured changing fashions and styles before almost anyone else for the past 40 years.
He was also fixture at every major runway show and star-studded celebrity event everybody loved being photographed by him even Anna Wintour the Editor in Chief of Vogue “I’ve said many times, we all get dressed for Bill.”
A slightly eccentric but much beloved character, he always dressed in his ‘uniform’ of navy French worker jacket over khaki slacks, and he lived for many years in a tiny studio over Carnegie Hall until 2010.
In 2008, the French Government awarded him with the Legion d’Honneur. Back in New York, and in 2009, he was actually named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Then In 2010, a documentary film, “Bill Cunningham New York,” which so beautifully captured this extraordinary man behind the camera, and when it premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, it sealed his reputation as a legend the likes of which we will never see again.
Here is a link to the whole movie and below that is the trailer of Lost Bohemia about Bill Cunningham and the other artist residents of the Carnegie Hall Studios as they are being evicted
