Bill Cunningham, Style Maven, Leaves Behind A Memoir And It’s ‘A Real Dilly’

Like a pair of pearl earrings from Tiffany’s, Bill Cunningham’s posthumous memoir arrives as if in a small blue box. It’s an unexpected gift. Cunningham, for many years the fashion and society photographer for The New York Times, left it behind when he died in 2016. Apparently no one knew he’d written it. It’s a curiosity, for sure. It’s mostly about the fashion world of the late 1940s through the early ’60s, when Cunningham was a hat designer and party crasher in Manhattan. “Fashion Climbing” seems to have been written not long after that era, to judge by its language, which is reminiscent of Archie comic books and moony teenagers sharing a malted milkshake in 1957. “Too swell for words”; “a real dilly”; “I thought I’d have pups”; “weekends were a hoot”; “the most super place in the world”; “you’d drop your teeth”; “you’d just die”; “putting on the dog”; “a real lulu.” Who writes like this? Cunningham does. Read more at The New York Times.