Buck-toothed, slender, with a thick Boston accent and self-effacing demeanor and often disheveled appearance, Bill Cunningham was, in some ways, the least likely person to become the preeminent chronicler of New York fashion, but there you have it.
Starting in 1979, when he by chance photographed an elderly woman, elegantly dressed in a fur coat — a woman who turned out to be the reclusive film legend Greta Garbo — Cunningham all but reinvented what we now call street fashion… or at least, he.