The elusive New York Times photographer is a street style pioneer who has chronicled the fashion people actually wear since the 1960s, with his weekly columns On The Street and Evening Hours. As he explains in Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary about his work and his life set to show at the New Zealand Film Festival: "The best fashion show is always on the street. Always has been and always will".
Like Coddington, he faces a battle against the commercialisation of modern fashion, with the onslaught of celebrity and what he describes as "cookie-cutter sameness".
"A lot of people have taste but they don't have the daring to be creative. Here we are in an age of cookie-cutter sameness; there are few that are rarities," he says in the film. It's those few rarities that Cunningham, in his early 80s, has dedicated his life to documenting on film (and all of his work is on film; rolls and rolls of it).
WATCH: Bill Cunningham New York trailer:
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Advertise with NZME.Director Richard Press was inspired to make the documentary after working with Cunningham on his pages at the Times as a freelance graphic designer.
"I had always loved what he did, and had always thought that it was important and really interesting work. But for me, the impetus for the movie was who he is as a person - how he lives his life, his ethics, his obsessive interest in his work and his way of being as a person was really what interested me and what I thought would make a good movie," says Press, on the phone from New York.
That movie took 10 years to make, explains Press - eight years to convince the notoriously private subject to be involved, and two years to film it.
"Given how private he is, and given that he didn't really understand what it meant for someone to make a documentary about somebody, we were constantly negotiating with him to have access to him. He just wants to do his work, he doesn't want to be bothered with anything else."
Eventually, Cunningham began to appreciate how dedicated the filming team were and allowed them access to his tiny studio apartment in the famous Carnegie Hall, where he slept on a mattress among rows of filing cabinets full of negatives.
"I knew he took his work seriously, but I had no idea that it was almost to the exclusion of everything else in his life," explains Press, who has obvious respect and admiration for his subject. "He really does this one thing, and that's kind of his life. He doesn't live the way most people live."
It's easy to see why so many fashion characters agreed to be interviewed by Press for the film: they all love Cunningham, from downtown club kids to uptown society queens. "He's an artist,'' explains club kid Kenny Kenny. "He's incredibly kind,'' says philanthropist Annette de la Renta, and he's the man the everybody gets dressed for according to Anna Wintour.
All of these figures were completely lovely, says Press. "All of it had to do with the fact they all love Bill. They have so much affection for him, the experience was really a pleasure."
