Bill Cunningham: A Memoir Of Style On All Levels, High And Low

I miss Bill Cunningham. There. I said it. I miss opening the Thursday and Sunday pages of the New York Times and seeing a whole cross-section of humanity, courtesy of Cunningham's photos, that had become a documentation of how New Yorkers lived and what they wore. It's fitting, then, that Cunningham's posthumous memoir, Fashion Climbing , should be published during New York Fashion Week. The fashion photographer was always on the streets outside the shows (where the people were often more interestingly dressed than the people on the runways), darting, quick as a sparrow, to get the best looks. And best looks did not automatically mean most expensive looks: "It didn't matter where you were coming from, or who you were going to be, or were supposed to be — if you were wearing something that said something about that day or that time, he was interested," says Hilton Als, from the New Yorker . Worshiping at a different altar Cunningham did not become who he was supposed to be — at least in