High Fashion Average Woman

If you don’t know who Bill Cunningham is, you should….especially if you want to learn anything about how to cultivate a

poster for the documentary "Bill Cunningham New York"

discerning eye for fashion and style.  Not to mention the lovely little lessons on the history of 20th century fashion that Cunningham weaves into his weekly fashion videos that are featured on the front of the Sunday  New York Times website

Cunningham has been a  photojournalist for The New York Times since at least the 1970′s–prior to that he was a fashion journalist for Women’s Wear Daily and a Harvard drop-out.  He has been taking candid street photographs of fashionable people for close to 50 years now.  While some might consider his photos “artless” it’s not art that Cunningham is looking to create.  Rather, he documents the ways in which people of all sorts interpret the fashion of their day, as much as he chronicles the evolutions of fashion styles….

For instance, in yesterday’s short titled “Sun Spot”, Cunningham views Paris Fashion Week, the last week of  shows for the Fall-Winter 2012 fashions.  He notes how much yellow he sees on women attending the shows (working women, many still clad in always-in-fashion black) and in the flowers dotting the Parisian landscape.  Cunningham notes that fashion is all a jumble right now, but that women nowadays want fashion that not only fits their lifestyle, but also fashion that they choose and pay for themselves.  In this “modern age” we are not the “decorative women” of the post-WWII 1950s,  who were festooned to represent the affluence of their husbands and who, in their leisure could be nothing more than decorative objects (much to the consternation of a lot of women.)

“When someone else is paying, then you buy something frivolous,” Cunningham says, ” When you’re paying for it yourself, you think twice.”

And that, to me is what marks the difference between adolescent fashion and grown-up fashion.  For adolescents (and the chronological age is variable) there’s spending a whole lot of money for something that is trendy and may look downright awful.  Grown-ups, however, don’t have that particular level of disposable income that so many young people might have…..

So, the young people become the frivolous fashionistas, which, IMO, is what’s plaguing a lot of fashion right at this moment.  We don’t have enough fashion for grown-ups who work, who raise families, who aren’t lounging around sipping smoothies and exercising all day in order to keep their “girlish figures.”

I love, though, that Cunningham is so delightfully sanguine and believes that fashion will turn around and reflect what women need.   This is another part of why I love to watch his photos and listen to him every week: in a fashion world that seems to be constantly unforgiving of women and women’s lives, Cunningham situates fashion in historical context, and, right now, reminds us of the upheaval that may indeed shake out for the best.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to watch Bill’s weekly videos and take his fashion and style recommendations…..

BTW, anybody seen my yellow scarf……

Tags: Bill Cunningham, cool stuff, fall-winter 2012, fashion, fashion photography, new york city, Paris Fashion Week, The New York Times