Fashion Climbing

It was okay. Bill Cunningham was a well-known photographer of people and fashion for the NY Times. This memoir (published posthumously) recounts his life up to that point. He grew up in a strict Boston Catholic home where his predilection for dressing in women's clothing or home decorating was appreciated. He stayed true to himself and persevered, find work as a teenager at Jordan Marsh and Bonwit Teller in Boston. He developed mentors who saw his potential, eventually moved to NYC to work at Bonwits and subsequently forged a life for himself as a millinery designer, opening up his own salon. Mr. Cunningham appears to have remained a “normal” human being who found himself, by virtue of his work, in the midst of High Society and Big Money. Some of the stories are witty, some are just pathetic. It was an interesting book by a man who lived an interesting life.