Dust off your blue French worker’s jackets: Selections from Bill Cunningham’s archive will be displayed at an upcoming exhibit at The New York Historical. Titled “We All Dress for Bill” after Anna Wintour’s distinguishing praise about him, the show will open in the winter of 2027 and display items from the archive, which includes a range of photographs from the 1960s to the 2010s; fabric swatches; scrapbooks; his camera (which has seen more defining moments in American fashion history than most of us can ever hope to); one of the bikes he used to zip around the city while capturing its clothing and its people; and, yes, his iconic blue coat.
Wintour will offer advisory support to the guest curator Raul Martinez, the global creative director of Vogue. “A show on Bill Cunningham brings together so many things, from photography to journalism to fashion to civic life, and Raul is fluent in them all,” Wintour said.
Cunningham practically invented the concept of street-style photography in the pages of this very newspaper. In his column “On the Street,” he would capture the passing fads and interminable style of New Yorkers, most memorably from his usual perch at the southwest corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. Decades before we had the streetwear hypebeast blogs or the man-on-the-street TikTok interviewers asking, “Who are you wearing?”, there was Bill. In his cobalt coat and with his 35-millimeter camera held up to his discerning eye, he documented the fur coats, Birkin bags and the practical and impractical shoes of city dwellers. He continued this chronicling for decades; his last “On the Street” column appeared in March 2016, just months before his death on June 25.
The archive at the Historical contains that history and much, much more. From the parties and fashion shows he captured to the remnants of his early hat-making days, the archive has a total of around 6,000 linear feet of items. Though it’s too soon to say which of those items will be in the final exhibit, anything from the archive will surely offer an intimate glance at a man who was, among other distinctions, officially designated as a living landmark of the city, whose pulse he lovingly and fearlessly felt.
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