Quick Take
- Narration: Arthur Morey captures Cunningham’s infectious, slightly breathless enthusiasm with precision, a narration that earns the material, delivering Cunningham’s unique voice without mimicry.
- Themes: identity and self-invention, the bohemian fashion world of mid-century New York, the tension between family shame and creative vocation
- Mood: Effervescent, nostalgic, and quietly melancholic beneath the surface
- Verdict: A posthumously released memoir that feels like a gift from one of New York’s most private public figures, rich, joyful, and more emotionally complex than its cheerful surface suggests.
I was halfway through a long train journey when Fashion Climbing shifted something in the atmosphere of my listening. I had been treating it as pleasant background, the kind of graceful memoir you enjoy without being especially challenged. Then Bill Cunningham describes walking past the Fifth Avenue store windows when he was broke and hungry, feeding himself on beautiful things, and I put my phone down for a moment. That line is the heart of this book. It is also the heart of Cunningham himself.
Fashion Climbing is a posthumous memoir: Cunningham wrote it, polished it to a finished typescript, and then kept it in a drawer for the rest of his life. It was found after his death in 2016, and its publication in 2018 was received as something between a literary gift and a final act of self-disclosure from one of New York’s most famously private figures. The man who spent decades cycling the streets of Manhattan photographing strangers’ style for The New York Times was almost compulsively guarded about his own inner life. This book is the exception he chose to leave behind.
The Education He Gave Himself
The memoir covers Cunningham’s youth in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston, his family’s resistance to what they could not categorize about him, his secret experiments with his sister’s dresses, his school days spent haunting chic Boston boutiques after hours. It follows him to New York, where he gate-crashed opera openings and extravagant balls not for the social access but for the fashion education: watching how gowns moved, how jewelry hung, how hair laid on each head in different light. This was, as he understood it, his real training. Cunningham had no formal fashion education, no institutional credential. He had an eye, a voracious appetite for beauty, and a willingness to cultivate both obsessively.
The hat designing years, when he worked under the alias William J. to protect his family from the shame of his vocation, are the memoir’s most vivid stretch. He describes catering to movie stars, heiresses, and artists with the same democratic enthusiasm he would later bring to photographing strangers on the sidewalk. The idea that a hat should make a woman an inspiration to herself and everyone who saw her is a design philosophy that also explains the ethics of his street photography: he was always looking for the people who made life more beautiful simply by being present in it.
Arthur Morey and the Question of Voice
Cunningham’s prose has a quality that is simultaneously formal and giddy, the writing of someone who learned to express himself through decades of fashion journalism but who retained the uncontained enthusiasm of the young man who pressed his face against boutique windows. Arthur Morey reads it with a precision that honors both registers. He does not impersonate Cunningham but finds a way of conveying his distinctive velocity of thought, the way one idea tumbles into the next, without losing the emotional undercurrent that runs beneath the surface cheerfulness.
This matters because Fashion Climbing is not simply a charming memoir about hats and parties. It is a document of a young man fighting his family’s definitions of who he was allowed to be, surviving on beauty when he could not afford food, creating a life through sheer creative will. Morey’s narration holds this complexity without overplaying it. Reviewer LKP, describing the book as an account of a man dying to express what was inside him, identifies exactly what Morey’s narration captures in the audio version.
What the Drawer Held Back
It is worth noting what this memoir deliberately excludes. Cunningham chose to end the story before the decades of New York Times photography that made him famous, before the New York street life of the 1970s and onward that defined his public legacy. The memoir covers his formation, not his career. Michael A. Helbig, in his review, initially worried about this omission and then found himself grateful for it: what the memoir captures is a particular bohemian world that no longer exists, a New York of extravagant balls and milliner studios and a fashion ecosystem before mass media changed its scale and character entirely.
The deliberateness of Cunningham’s time frame is, on reflection, its own statement. He wanted to tell the story of who he was before he became an institution. The finished typescript polished and then kept private for decades suggests someone who knew exactly what story he was telling and chose when it should be heard.
For the Reader Who Wants Fashion Memoir With Interior Life
Fashion Climbing will disappoint anyone expecting a behind-the-scenes account of the New York Times fashion scene or celebrity anecdotes from his photography career. It delivers something rarer: a self-portrait of a genuinely original person in the act of becoming who he would be. Listeners who love fashion history, New York bohemian memoir, or simply the kind of writing that turns joy into form will find this extraordinary.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Fashion Climbing cover Cunningham’s years at The New York Times, or does it end before his famous photography career?
The memoir ends before the Times period. Cunningham focuses on his Boston childhood, his early New York years, and his career as a hat designer under the alias William J. The decades of street photography that made him famous are not part of this book, which is a deliberate choice he made about the story he wanted to tell.
Arthur Morey narrates several literary memoirs, does his style suit Cunningham’s distinctive voice?
Morey’s narration is one of the audiobook’s genuine strengths. He captures Cunningham’s characteristic mix of formal prose and infectious enthusiasm without impersonating him. The emotional complexity underneath the surface cheerfulness comes through clearly.
Why did Cunningham keep this memoir in a drawer rather than publish it during his lifetime?
The memoir does not explain this directly, and speculation about his motives is outside what the text offers. What is clear is that it was finished and polished, not abandoned. The choice to leave it for posthumous publication seems consistent with his lifelong privacy about his inner life, even as his outer life was conducted almost entirely in public.
Is Fashion Climbing appropriate for listeners who are not particularly interested in fashion history?
Yes. The fashion content is the setting, but the memoir is really about identity, family resistance, self-invention, and the particular kind of passion that drives a person to build a life around beauty. Cunningham’s story works as a coming-of-age memoir about finding and defending who you are, regardless of whether you care about hats.
