Bill Cunningham, street styler

J’ai decouvert hier en lisant un article sur Bill Cunningham, cet homme de 84 ans qui arpente les rues de new York à vélo depuis 50 ans, avec son appareil photo, m’a interpellé.

Je voulais vous faire partager son histoire.

Ce génie, touchant que l’on définit comme un street styler, photographie non pas les gens, mais les vêtements, passionné par ce que les gens portent. Il est l’histoire de l’évolution des changements et des retours de la mode.

Son minuscule studio situé au dessus du Carnegie Hall est ainsi rempli de tonnes de négatifs.

L’histoire à commencé il y a un peu plus de 40 ans pour Bill Cunningham, trouvant les photos qu’il avait pris d’un manteau de vison fantastique, il s’est resolu a pousser la porte du New York Times, pour les proposer.

Emballement du New York Times, pas pour le manteau de vison, mais pour celle qui le portait : Greta Garbo, c'était le début.

Pour que l’histoire soit compléte, il faut préciser que Bill Cunningham qui ne mange que des hot dogs à 3 dollars, n’avait pas et n’a d’ailleurs toujours pas de télévision.

A few summers ago, on upper Fifth Avenue, Bill Cunningham spied a remarkable creature: a woman, in her seventies, with a corona of blue hair—not the muzzy pastel hue associated with bad dye jobs but the irradiant one of Slurpees and laundry detergent. The woman gave Cunningham an idea. Every day for a month, whenever he saw something cerulean (a batik shawl) or aqua (a Hawaiian-print sarong) or azure (a Japanese parasol) coming down the sidewalk, he snapped a picture of it. One morning, he spotted a worker balancing, on his shoulder, a stuffed blue marlin. “I thought, That’s it, kid!” he recently recalled. The following Sunday, “On the Street,” the street-fashion column that Cunningham has maintained in the Times for more than a decade, was populated entirely with New Yorkers dressed in various shades of the color—a parade of human paint chips. “Mediterranean shades of blue are not yet the new pink, but they are a favorite this summer,” he wrote.

“The cooling watery tones, worn as an accent with white and browns, appear in turquoise-color jewelry and blue hair, but it is rare to see a man crossing the Avenue of the Americas with a trophy sailfish.”

Cunningham’s job is not so different from a fisherman’s: it requires a keen knowledge, honed over years, of the local ecosystem and infinite patience in all manner of weather conditions. His first big catch was an accident. It was 1978, and a woman wearing a nutria coat had caught his eye. “I thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful,’ ” he later wrote. “And it was a plain coat, too. You’d look at it and think: ‘Oh, are you crazy? It’s nothing.’ ” Cunningham shot frame after frame of the coat, eventually noticing that other people on the sidewalk were paying attention to its wearer.

It was Greta Garbo. Cunningham showed the pictures, along with some shots of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (whom he recognized), Farrah Fawcett (whom he didn’t, not owning a television), and the King and Queen of Spain, carrying plastic bags from Gristedes, to an editor at the Times. “The editor said, ‘Why don’t you wait and see who you get next week?’ ” Cunningham recalled. “And I said, ‘My God, I’m not expecting Jesus Christ.’ ” Soon after, his column became a recurring feature.

“On the Street”—along with Cunningham’s society column, “Evening Hours”—is New York’s high-school yearbook, an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked. Class of 1992: velvet neck ribbons, leopard prints, black jeans, catsuits, knotted shirts, tote bags, berets (will they ever come back, after Monica?). Class of 2000: clamdiggers, beaded fringe, postcard prints, jean jackets, fish-net stockings, flower brooches (this was the height of “Sex and the City”). The column, in its way, is as much a portrait of New York at a given moment in time as any sociological tract or census—a snapshot of the city.

On September 16, 2001, Cunningham ran a collage of signs (“our finest hour,” “we are stronger now”) and flags (on bandannas, on buildings, on bikes) that makes one as sad and proud, looking at it now, as it did when it was published. So far this year, he has identified vogues for picture-frame collars, microminis, peg-legged pants, and the color gray (“often with a dash of sapphire or violet,” in the manner of the Edwardians). His columns are frequently playful—he once featured a woman, near the Plaza, walking three standard poodles, “an unmatched set in pink, turquoise, and white”—but they also convey an elegiac respect for the anonymous promenade of life in a big city, and a dead-serious desire to get it all down.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/16/090316fa_fact_collins#ixzz1Qjn0o300