When it comes to fashion photography, Bill Cunningham was hands down the GOAT.
“We all dress for Bill,” Vogue’s Anna Wintour once said of the street style photographer who captured ‘moments in fashion history’ for nearly 40 years for The New York Times.
And now the Times have revealed that Cunningham wrote a secret memoir before his death, aged 87, in June 2016. Given the fact that the lensman was notoriously private, the memoir’s existence has left the FROW (and beyond) shooketh.
The manuscript was discovered by his family, who auctioned it off to Penguin Press.
Titled ‘Fashion Climbing’, it reportedly features an introduction by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, who describes the book as having a certain “Breakfast at Tiffany’s flavor.” Delicious.
The book chronicles Cunningham’s ascent from humble beginnings as a dress-obsessed boy in a Boston Catholic family, to a gate-crasher at New York Fashion Week, to becoming one of the most revered street style photographers of all time.
“For me, this book is really for those of us who came to New York with a dream and saw New York City as a real oasis of creativity and freedom, a place to be who we want to be,” Christopher Richards, an editor at Penguin, tells the Times.
“It’s a really beautiful story about a young, artistic man finding his way in the city, in a particular kind of bohemian world that doesn’t quite exist anymore.”
The book is set to be released by September, and we for one are on the edge of our seats.
