Sacai and Bergdorf Goodman paid homage to the late street photographer Bill Cunningham and the just-out book “The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973” at a party Wednesday night.
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The Rizzoli release’s author Mark Bozek also played a leading role in the festivities, which were held in Goodman’s Bar in the retailer’s men’s store.
Cunningham, who died in 2016 at the age of 87, was an omnipresence on the fashion scene for decades. His signature look was a French “bleu de travail” workwear jacket. Inspired by the lensman’s uniform of choice, Sacai’s Chitose Abe has created her own version and a few other Cunningham-inspired styles. Some of his archival photos from the 1973 “Battle of Versailles” fashion show — a standoff between Bill Blass, Anne Klein, Halston, Donna Karan, Stephen Burrows and Oscar de la Renta and their French counterparts Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Pierre Cardin, Marc Bohan and Emanuel Ungaro — are featured in the new book.
A few of the models, Alva Chinn and Norma Jean Darden, who participated in the famed showdown at the Palace of Versailles, made the rounds at the party. While Bozek and Burrows signed copies of the new book, some guests checked out Sacai’s “Bill Cunningham boxy jacket.” Its price tag of $1,155 might have been a wallop to Cunningham, whose preferred mode of a transportation was a Biria three-speed bike.
The event’s location was right near Cunningham’s favorite spot for street photography — Fifth Avenue and 57 th Street, which made him indirectly part of Bergdorf Goodman ’s history, said senior vice president of the fashion office and director of women’s fashion and store presentation Linda Fargo. Abe, who attended Wednesday’s event, stamped one of the photographer’s favorite expressions on T-shirts and hoodies: “FASHION IS THE ARMOR TO SURVIVE EVERYDAY LIFE.”
Fargo said, “Chitose got a little fixated on that. Her work is kind of ‘beautility’ — beauty and utility mixed together.”
While Bozek sported the Cunningham-inspired jacket, Fargo said that she had worn it earlier in the day, but a little differently. Describing the label as “very much a BG favorite,” she said half the time the buyers are wearing Sacai.
Burrows recalled how starting in the 1960s, Cunningham had always greeted him and his friends with “Hey, kids!” Reflecting on the designer showdown at Versailles, Burrows was reminded of “how much fun it was to do it. It turned out that we put on a good show.”
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Bozek, the director of the 2018 documentary “The Times of Bill Cunningham,” said that he had wanted to share never-before-seen Battle of Versailles photos that were taken by Cunningham and Jean-Luce Huré. He also lined up another participant, Liza Minnelli, to pen the forward. (One of the show’s models, Pat Cleveland, contributed too, as did Diet Prada.) A shot of Minnelli on the stage at Versailles that Cunningham accidentally double exposed was “by far” Bozek’s favorite image in the book. “It was a mistake. Bill didn’t roll the film fast enough,” Bozek said.
The former longtime New York Times photographer’s lasting appeal comes down to how he was the “purest, real fashionista ever,” Bozek said. “There’s nobody who comes close to his knowledge, history, way of living and humbleness.”
As for what the photographer would have thought of the Bergdorf Goodman tribute, Burrows said, “He would have hated it.”
Fargo seemed to agree, speculating that he would not have wanted anything to do with it. “Bill was so self-effacing. He never really liked the spotlight on him. But if he felt that it served some kind of greater good or was a part of the wheels of business, he supported that. He wanted business to flourish.”
But the seasoned photographer Mary Hilliard, whose photo of Cunningham is showcased in a store window, disagreed. “He would have loved it. He was not the shy person that some people though he was. He knew what it was about. He would come into a party and say to me, ‘Well, who is here?’ I would tell him who was being honored, and that’s so-and-so,” she said.
Recalling how she would point out key attendees like Gwyneth Paltrow, Hilliard said Cunningham would say, “‘I’m not interested in them.’ Then they would be the ones in his paper. He pretended that he didn’t care. But he cared. He cared about a lot. He was much more complicated than most people thought,” she said.
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