Fashion Climbing is delightfully dishy, snarky, judgmental, harsh, kind, adoring and ridiculously straightforward ... He was an incomparable observer of the New York social scene ... the most wonderful part of Fashion Climbing for this reader wasn’t the divine and transformative writing about the clothes or the parties, it was reading about all of Cunningham’s personal heroes — all women ... it is hard not to be gobsmacked reading it ... Fashion Climbing is smart and pure, revealing of a person’s sense of truth, self, business, confidence and wonderment at the world.
Set against a backdrop of postwar retail, high society and fashion, this obscenely enjoyable romp fills in part of the Cunningham back story and provides tantalizing peeks into the psyche of the guarded and mysterious Bill ... Bill’s quirky, unpretentious voice guides the reader through the postwar period of Manhattan glamour ... Fashion Climbing, with its truncated timeline, leaves the reader gasping for more ... His observations about fashion and culture sharpened over time. I can only hope there’s another installment lurking in his archives.
Like a pair of pearl earrings from Tiffany’s, Bill Cunningham’s posthumous memoir arrives as if in a small blue box. It’s an unexpected gift ... Fashion Climbing is reminiscent of Archie comic books and moony teenagers sharing a malted milkshake in 1957 ... At times Fashion Climbing can seem like the most guileless thing ever written and its author slightly touched in the head, in a kind and upbeat 'Forrest Gump' sort of way ... Fashion Climbing is poorly served by Hilton Als’s introduction, which is emotive... while not telling you any of the things you want to know.
The opening paragraphs of Fashion Climbing land like a sharp slap ... What’s inspiring about Cunningham’s story is that he survived and thrived on hard work, unbridled creativity and self-expression despite disapproval from family, some in the fashion establishment and even some customers bewildered by some of his more whimsical and outlandish designs ... this book deftly and vividly captures why so many wanted to celebrate him and why he is still remembered today.
The language, full of phrases such as 'stitching up a storm' and 'a dope like me,' suggests that it was written in a pre-Internet age, but to the end, Cunningham always sounded like a man whose turns of phrase were firmly rooted in black-and-white Hollywood-ese ... It’s not so much the language that places his memoir in time, but rather its tenor. It’s upbeat and chirpy — free of today’s irony and angst-riddled navel-gazing ... Cunningham’s memoir is, to use one of his favorite words, a marvelous glimpse into the fashion world as New York was coming into its own ... He seems a bit of an unreliable narrator — unreliable because of sheer stubborn cheerfulness ... Cunningham writes with forthright simplicity ... He was profoundly private, and anyone who reaches for his memoir hoping that it will offer insight into his personal life will be disappointed ... Fashion Climbing is a letter from another era. It can be both charming and anachronistic.
The book...is a precise, unrancorous (mostly) record of his nascent sensibility, ‘self-education in fashion,’ unfettered excitements, hard work, mistakes and triumphs as he learned to trust his own vision ... Fashion Climbing sometimes reads as a picaresque tale, but it is a drama of creative survival and its strategies, vividly felt ... his language is one of the great, idiosyncratic pleasures of Fashion Climbing ... The mixture of descriptive verve, incongruity, slang of another time, seeming coinages, simplicity and weirdness was as alive in his millinery as in his sentences ... his lavish descriptions produce, in my brain at least, a simultaneous transport away from and intensification of the present ... Fashion Climbing, like its author, is deeply emotional—a rather uninhibited number as well as reticent; at once full of whimsy and emphatic in expertise; dedicated above all to an expansive love.
Cunningham sheds little light on the details of his personal life. The book’s focus is (nearly) all professional. But what comes through in almost every chapter is an unflappable spirit ... Reading Cunningham is akin to sitting down with a grandparent or congenial pensioner as they recall adventures from the good old days. His writing style is breezy and conversational ... Fashion Climbing leaves you longing for just a sliver more insight into Cunningham’s life.
Fashion Climbing, a memoir that was found among his papers after his death in 2016, amplifies the wonderful portrait that emerged from Richard Press's 2010 documentary ... The voice is the same — effervescently enthusiastic ... Fashion Climbing's most interesting revelations are about Cunningham's early years. But don't expect a tell-all. Even Hilton Als's introduction fails to fill in any blanks about Cunningham's personal life ... Written with more enthusiasm (and clichés) than literary panache, Cunningham's memoir is a charming ode to being true to oneself.
...[a] charming memoir ... Cunningham comes off as a screwball mix of sophisticate and naif ... He seems to have dished more as a young man than as the elder version, since in the film he doesn’t have a bad word to say about anyone. In the memoir, he calls out designers he thought were coasting (ahem, Christian Dior) ... What Cunningham does not do is reveal himself. A childhood incident, when his mother discovers him wearing one of her dresses and beats the daylights out of him, is the only clue about what the memoirist felt deep inside ... Maybe the best we can hope for is that, somewhere in a trunk above Carnegie Hall, there’s a second volume that will bring us up to date?
Those familiar with Cunningham and his work will be unsurprised by the reverence with which he writes about fashion [in Fashion Climbing]. Nor will they be surprised by the disdain he reserves for all things pretentious and passionless ... [Cunningham writes] with an almost-frantic excitement ... In his own words, we get a Cunningham that has the same beautiful complexity with which he regarded his subjects on the street ... Above all, Fashion Climbing is a celebration of pleasure without the veil of exclusivity that the more pretentious sides of fashion feed on.
Bill Cunningham’s memoir is a time capsule of the fashion industry in mid-century America ... The book doesn’t focus much on the catty gossip – or personal confessions – many hope for from a fashionable read ... But it does offer unique insight into how someone who eventually found himself in the eye of the fashion swirl started his career as a complete outsider ... Because Cunningham wrote most of the text before he transitioned into the role of fashion documentarian, it's fascinating to read his predictions for how the industry was poised to evolve, and weigh them against what has actually changed.
There are interesting anecdotes... but the book only barely reaches the time he started in fashion journalism at Women’s Wear Daily, and doesn’t relay his interest in photography at all. It’s almost like we’re reading the memoir of an entirely different person. The fact that the book suspends Cunningham in a past that pales in comparison to his work as a photographer is exacerbated by it style of writing. The prose rather reads like a ’50s primer: formal, an almost affected sense of bemusement at anything improper, and peppered with antiquated words ... As a relic, and an unearthed treasure from Cunningham’s past, it’s charming, but there are many unanswered questions as to why this book exists ... Cynics might say Fashion Climbing is a cash grab, a fully written book with a prominent name attached. Fans might say it’s an endearing look at the origins of one of fashion’s most beloved — and missed — figures. Regardless of its intention, it at least gives us another look at the man whom we all wanted to see us.
The book illuminates one of the fashion and newspaper world’s most quietly influential sensibilities. Cunningham’s point of view is singular not just when it comes to fashion ... Fashion Climbing begins with a formative event that reads like something out of a dark fairy tale.
In an era when breathless tell-all memoirs are rushed to press, how refreshing to read a somewhat discreet memoir whose existence the author revealed only after the end of his fabulously colorful life ... Fashion Climbing is both refreshing and surprising. For any of us who don’t think much about fashion, the book is a revelation ... Not so fast, you rumor-mongers. Cunningham certainly reveals plenty of scandalous behavior, most involving the one sin he considered unpardonable: a lack of originality. But he took any personal sexual secrets, his own or anyone else’s, with him beyond the grave ... Cunningham’s central message seems to be that an artist is better off retaining integrity and living on Ovaltine.
[Fashion Climbing] is no tell-all, but there are plenty of juicy reasons why such a tactful, private person would have left it in a drawer for so long ... Cunningham's personal life is glossed over, but his social portrait of the workshops, fitting rooms, runways, ballrooms and stylish characters of this time is wonderfully detailed and incomparable
Cunningham’s memoir depicts a life that is fulsome and mirthful but also oddly austere. Sometimes there was no money, his diet reduced to three spoonfuls of Ovaltine, his shoes patched with scraps of cardboard. His hat-making seems more like an addiction than a career. For Cunningham, however, beauty was worth every sacrifice. Reading this memoir, it is necessary to forget for a moment that no woman wants to be valued primarily for how she looks. That is quite a lot for a book to ask. Yet as a record of a life fuelled by flair and dedication, a highly original vocation which pitches the author somewhere between Cecil Beaton, Anna Pavlova and a Benedictine monk, Fashion Climbing: A New York Life is a joy to read.
[A] surprising and sprightly posthumous memoir ... For all the book’s frivolity, Cunningham is a truth teller in an artifice-draped world ... The glamorous world of 20th-century fashion comes alive in Cunningham’s masterful memoir both because of his exuberant appreciation for stylish clothes and his sharp assessment of those who wore them.
In addition to the charming narrative, the book features photographs of some of the author’s designs and social sphere, and he offers readers a reminder that characters like him still might roam NYC streets. Cunningham’s writing is authentic, irreverent, and quintessentially New York—even though he made numerous jaunts to foreign countries to visit the fashion capitals of the world ... A lively tale of a life in style and a delightful homage to the days before women stopped wearing hats.
