Before He Was a Photographer, Bill Cunningham Was a Hat Maker

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/t-magazine/bill-cunningham-hat-designer.html

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IN 1948, Bill Cunningham left the comforts of his middle-class Boston home, as well as a promising Harvard scholarship (classes, he wrote, “were like being in prison”) for the chance to make it in New York City. Nineteen years old, and skinny as a beanpole, he had been offered a training course working at the luxury department store Bonwit Teller, where he eventually landed a job in the advertising department. As he remembered, “I took to New York life like a star shooting through the heavens.”

Cunningham is best known for his two New York Times columns On the Street and Evening Hours, which officially began in 1989, though he covered fashion for The Times from the late ’70s until his death at the age of 87 in 2016. The first was a roving report of how people dressed — to work, to lunch, going to see their shrinks — which meant Cunningham was on a perpetual street safari. The second was more of a society diary, respectfully aware of certain dynasties and clans whose black-tie charity work cast a nostalgic glow, even in a post-Truman Capote New York City. Both were united by Cunningham’s appreciation for the smallest of details: the sash of a ball gown as a woman walked down a set of marble steps, the slope of a coat shoulder on a woman lunging over a puddle of melting snow. He was often seen riding around Manhattan on his bicycle, clad in his blue workman’s jacket and khaki pants, his camera hanging at the ready around his neck.

But before he documented other people’s creations, Cunningham made his own. Within his first year in New York City, he launched a millinery business under the name William J. (the “J” was for John), one intended to give the fashionable society women of Manhattan the hats of their dreams. It was a small success, or as much as it could be — Cunningham had to put the business on hold a couple of years later when he was drafted to serve in the Korean War. This, and other details, are documented in his posthumously published memoir, “Fashion Climbing,” out next month with Penguin Press, which Cunningham wrote in secret, leaving two identical copies among his possessions for someone to find. The gesture seems to imply that if he was less interested in the attention most writers crave, he was determined that the last word on his life would be his own.

Upon his return from France in 1954 (he was stationed in Europe), he began making hats again, and though the memories of extravagant parties and stories of ideal customers (Marilyn Monroe visited his shop) remain, the creations themselves do not. While about two dozen of Cunningham’s hats are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, and a few are on display in the current Bill Cunningham exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, the majority of them are lost forever. In part, this is because by 1962, Cunningham had stopped making them altogether. Women’s fashion was shifting. Young women weren’t wearing hats anymore. But it’s also because Cunningham didn’t make his hats for posterity — they were daring and inventive objets, willed into existence by the sheer force of his imagination.

Seen now, they hint, startlingly, at a hidden, inner passion, a wildness at odds with the disciplined, even ascetic, existence for which he later became known. His hats were joyous, improbable things: an octopus and her dangling limbs, a fish with glittering scales, a giant clamshell through which a slice of a woman’s face peeked, a gleaming pearl. (To mold one collection, Cunningham soaked the straw in his studio’s bathtub, jumping in and out in his bathing suit.) Others were decorated with the plumages of peacocks and ostriches or adorned with sable and chinchilla. Still others were made to resemble vegetables and fruits — apples, cabbages, pears, oranges, carrots, even a wedge of watermelon. There were potted plants, whose blooms and foliage appeared to grow straight from the woman’s head. They were surreal, strange, touched by madness. These aren’t hats suited for those hoping to look like everyone else. To wear a hat by William J. meant being the kind of woman (or man) that Cunningham so relentlessly sought out when he finally picked up the camera professionally in 1967. From there, his role changed: The objective was to disappear.

WHAT WAS IT about Cunningham that made him so beloved? It wasn’t actually the quality of photographs, which were good, but not great. It wasn’t necessarily his writing, which could be charming, yes, and lively, but still wasn’t the same as hearing his Boston accent (“mar-vuhl-us!”). He wasn’t really one thing or the other and that, arguably, is what made him so irresistible — Cunningham always acted as if he were someone from the outside looking in, even if in reality, he was an insider who simply preferred to remain on the outside. But in keeping his distance, he maintained an impartiality that can’t be replicated, that feels incorruptible. When he reluctantly agreed to be filmed for “Bill Cunningham New York,” a 2011 documentary about his life, we finally got to see more of the person behind his camera. His small studio apartment atop Carnegie Hall was shockingly spartan and eccentric (rows of uneven filing cabinets, wire hangers, the mattress propped on milk crates) — but it was a haven for a soul comfortable with solitude: His true life was outside, on the streets. What made him exceptional was his unceasing curiosity, his desire to see it all — every purple coat on a winter’s day, every emerald dress at every single black-tie ball that night.

Often, the best observers of art are, in fact, artists themselves. Running a millinery was difficult work. Cunningham had no money of his own to invest (he was aware that his family was ashamed that he worked in fashion, and too proud to ask for anything). What whimsical designs he made were often easily copied by larger manufacturers. In his first four years as a hatter, he says he was “thrown out of seven banks” for bad checks. Perhaps a steady gig, at a large newspaper, was reliable. Perhaps too, he found there was a safety in being behind the lens.

I once called out to Cunningham. I was in my early 20s, in a glittering party dress, standing outside the American Museum of Natural History with a friend. She was embarrassed for me — she thought I was being rude — but I had merely felt an irrepressible exuberance in recognizing someone I thought was special. He was unlocking his bicycle. He ignored me (politely, I will add) — and I understand why now, because I believe he preferred to ignore himself. He was the master of remaining unknown. It was one of his great powers, even if he was a ubiquitous sight in New York City, our Waldo in blue. He may be best remembered for his persistence in capturing the knowable — in finding the people who longed to be seen. But now we know a little better, happily, what he saw in himself as well.