Bill Cunningham Finds Fabulous Coats
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Photographer Bill Cunningham attends a celebration for his career at Bergdorf Goodman.
For those of you who haven't yet been turned onto Bill Cunningham—best known for his "On the Street" fashion collages (compiled of ridiculously chic shots of ladies in New York, Paris, London, and more) for The New York Times—for the love of all that's holy, start listening to his audio slideshows. We're already infatuated with the dulcet tones of Cathy Horyn's blow-by-blow audio slideshows during fashion week, and now we're hooked on the charmingly retro narration of the gentleman Cunningham.
He's so guilelessly chatty about ridiculously upper crust women in the city! His most recent feature tackles women wearing their glamorous old coats, pulled out of their closets as a nod to the recession—why buy a new coat when an old one will suffice? At first it's so adorable—Cunningham keeps referring to the coats as "mah-velous" and they are incredibly voluminous and incredible ... but then you realize that they're all incredibly designer coats. He follows a certain Ms. Stern through several iterations of ridiculously expensive vintage coats and then "stumbles" on a lady wearing a ridiculously stunning old Balenciaga piece that even Cunningham admits was in a museum collection.
Suddenly, in between waiting for the charming old photog to utter the phrase "the bee's knees" (he really is that endearing), you realize he's actually saying, "Just reach back into your closet" .... as though we might find a vintage designer gem buried in the back! Wow. Some reach into their closets and come out with Balenciaga; we reach in and come out with a Bryan Adams concert tee unearthed at Cheap Jack's. (And we thought it was so cheekily hip at the time!) Bill, we long to live in your world.
