Fashion Climbing

Starred review from May 21, 2018
The legendary New York Times photographer whose extraordinary eye captured high fashion and high society in his columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours” turns his focus to his early years and early career in this surprising and sprightly posthumous memoir. Cunningham (1929–2016), who grew up in an Irish Catholic suburb of Depression-era Boston, recalls his first brush with fashion at age four when he donned his sister’s pink organza party dress. Though reprimanded by his Boston-proper mother, the incident didn’t deter him from a lifelong obsession with clothes and couture. After dropping out of Harvard at 19, Cunningham moved to New York, where he worked in carriage-trade retail and then struck out on his own as a high-end hat designer whose often outrageous millinery was inspired by fruit, fish, and fowl. His antics and adventures—hiding behind plants at a Chanel show or under a table at a debutante ball, sneaking into the Waldorf Astoria to glimpse Queen Elizabeth—give readers a front-row seat on the mid-century fashion world, and the black and white photos, many featuring a dapper, young Cunningham beaming ear to ear, document a fantastical bygone era. For all the book’s frivolity, Cunningham is a truth teller in an artifice-draped world: he calls some of the customers who bought his hats “star-spangled bitches... full of conniving tricks to get the price as low as possible” and singles out Women’s Wear Daily publisher John Fairchild as a fake who played favorites. The glamorous world of 20th-century fashion comes alive in Cunningham’s masterful memoir both because of his exuberant appreciation for stylish clothes and his sharp assessment of those who wore them.

June 15, 2018
A posthumous memoir encapsulates the momentous life of an eccentric fashion icon.Though he was known as the man who walked the streets of New York with a camera in hand, capturing the idiosyncratic fashion of the city's citizens, Cunningham (1929-2016) grew up in a "middle-class Catholic home in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston." To the horror of his parents, fashion fascinated Cunningham--he would secretly put on his sister's dresses--and he refused to give in to the expectations his family had with regard to what he should pursue, both personally and professionally. "I never go down the street or enter a room without automatically deciding what the woman should wear," he writes. "It's probably the reason for the heavy development of my eye toward fashion." As a late teen, Cunningham left for New York, officially anchoring himself in the city that would become his life fuel. He started working as a hat maker, serving some of the city's elite, and eventually opened up his own store. This was 1950s New York, when the love of haute couture and excess was praised above the opposing rising bohemian values. "Designing a fashion collection," writes the author, "is like growing antennas that reach high into the unknown and hopefully higher than any other designer's. It's a long time growing them till inspiration begins to tickle and outrates that of your competitors. With each new collection my antennas grew longer, starting in 1948, and reaching their highest by 1960." In addition to the charming narrative, the book features photographs of some of the author's designs and social sphere, and he offers readers a reminder that characters like him still might roam NYC streets. Cunningham's writing is authentic, irreverent, and quintessentially New York--even though he made numerous jaunts to foreign countries to visit the fashion capitals of the world.A lively tale of a life in style and a delightful homage to the days before women stopped wearing hats.

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Starred review from July 1, 2018
Cunningham's almost unbearably charming memoir?unearthed by relatives after his death, in 2016, and covering his life through the 1960s?sends readers winging through the twentieth century in style. The seemingly eternally optimistic Cunningham was born in 1929 in a conservative Boston suburb, where holidays were his break from drab puritanical life, an occasion to catalog churchgoing ladies' elegance and to dress up himself. Doggedly devoted to an artistic life despite his family's disapproval, Cunningham nurtured his fashion interests working in department stores before dropping out of Harvard after one semester and moving to New York, where he began making hats as William J. (to minimize his family's offense). Ensuing decades find him designing, hobnobbing, even serving in the army abroad for a stint (a wonderfully broadening experience ), and always, always observing. It only adds to the book's richness that, though a scattering of uncaptioned photos adorn its pages, it ends before Cunningham really began his career as a fashion photographer?what he's most known for and the focus of a documentary film about him. Rather, it documents his unparalleled eye and appreciation for fashion's magic, mystery, and illusions; style's potential to invent and transform. As both the very personal autobiography of an icon and a valuable social history, this wins.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2018

Before Cunningham (1929-2016) was a photographer and a "living landmark," he wanted nothing more than to create fanciful hats and observe what chic New York ladies were wearing. In the days of outlandish headwear, his milliner's antennae reached further than most, to octopus shapes and floor-length fringe. Crashing elegant parties and designer shows in the 1950s and 1960s served as his self-education in fashion. In this posthumous memoir (affectionately prefaced by Hilton Als), Cunningham recounts formative years as a style obsessive misunderstood by his conservative family. After dropping out of Harvard and moving to New York City, he sells eccentric hats as "William J." and sees Europe in the army. In a distinctive voice that rasps off the page, he tells delightful stories of impoverished creative types decorating before a party, improvising a dress from a shower curtain, or hiding under a table to glimpse a fashion show: "These were wonderful wild days, when fashion was all we ate and drank." As the title suggests, Cunningham cattily observes how for some, fashion is social climbing, for others the pure love of beautiful things. VERDICT This madcap insider account of the mid-20th-century fashion world is a gift for fans of Cunningham's photography.--Lindsay King, Yale Univ. Libs, New Haven, CT

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