Bill Cunningham New York: The Father of Street-style.

…bit of an underwhelming title for such an incredible concept, no? ‘Bill Cunningham New York’ is the latest installment in the genre of feature fashion documentaries (the most recent hoo-ha-inducing examples being R.J. Cutler’s The September Issue from 2009 and Matt Tyrnauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor from 2008), directed and produced by Richard Press, and is set to hit New York cinema screens come March 16th.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYqiLJBXbss]

Needless to say, I’m deliriously excited about the prospect of seeing the 81-year-old street-style photographer in action. Long before the rise-to-fame of street-style bloggers such as Scott Schuman of The Sart and Tommy Ton of Jak & Jil, Cunningham was documenting, for The New York Times, the various styles on the streets of the city that never sleeps.

Since taking up the post a whopping 50 years ago, Cunningham has been defining with his apparently battered (or so The Telegraph tells me) Nikon camera what many have misunderstood to be a ‘new’ trend. Street-style, according to Harold Koda, curator at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, emerged during the mid-1960s which coincided with the time Cunningham himself developed a penchant for photography.

With members of fashion’s elite from Anna Wintour to Calvin Klein Collection designer Francisco Costa clambering to congratulate Cunningham on his legacy, this is surely one of the industry’s most memorable figures and I, for one, can’t wait to witness his legacy.

– 

^ Cunningham at work

Learn more from the Telegraph‘s feature.