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I was sitting in the pressroom on West 40th Street, across from the Bryant Park fashion show tents, and I was crying. This was over 20 years ago, I had just started out as a fashion writer, and I wasn’t invited to any of the big, important shows, I couldn’t even get standing room. I was reduced to crouching in the photo pit at Anna Sui, where an enraged photographer stepped on my head.
It was the end of a long day, and despair at my sad station had all but sunk whatever slender self-worth I possessed. When Bill Cunningham saw the state I was in, he crouched down beside and said defiantly, “Child, who cares if we’re not invited! Who cares about these uptown people! We are downtown people!’’ He was by then employed by The New York Times, lived in the midtown Carnegie Hall Studios, and was in fact invited to absolutely everything, but his spirit, it seemed, resided with me in lower Manhattan bohemia.
In truth, Bill didn’t belong to any particular part of town, or more accurately, he was at home in all of it. I knew him long before his kindness that day—years earlier, when I was just a funny dresser working at a menial job in the advertising department of the Village Voice, he frequently took my picture. I was the furthest thing from famous; I knew absolutely no one and hadn’t published a word since the college newspaper. But Bill wasn’t interested in who I was—what he seemed to respond to in me, and to other strangers in this strange city, was what I was: an anonymous person with a deep desire to look a certain way, to see and be seen for reasons buried deeply in the psyche, as mysterious as the impulse for decoration itself.
Once I got a real job in fashion, Bill gave me other important advice. He cautioned me to remember that the people I was writing about were not my friends, that I was meant to be covering them objectively, and that I mustn’t let myself be compromised. I obeyed these instructions for about five seconds. Though I knew that of course he was right, he was made of far sterner stuff than I—he wouldn’t even accept a glass of water at a banquet; I gleefully wallowed in black-tie dinners and luxurious booty.
Bill did allow me to give him one gift. Every fashion season, on the first day of the shows, he would bring over his flappy copy of Ruth Finley’s Fashion Calendar and ask me to circle the obscure events I thought he should go to—weird, offbeat presentations where he hoped to find something sui generis to photograph. This ritual made me feel so important, so special—as if we were in a conspiracy of coolness, searching together for the wild, the nutty, the unpredictable.
It didn’t matter at that moment that he had been given the Legion d’Honneur by the French government in 2008, that he was declared a Living Landmark in 2009 by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. I knew in my heart that the two of us were downtown people.