WASHINGTON — Bill Cunningham, who dropped out of Harvard to pursue a career making hats for high-society women before becoming renowned as a roving street-fashion photographer for The New York Times, documenting — and at times influencing — fashion trends with his keen eye for emerging styles, died Saturday in New York City. He was 87.
His death was announced by the Times. The cause was complications from a stroke.
For decades, Mr. Cunningham photographed New York’s social, philanthropic, and fashion whirl for the Times. Zipping across the Big Apple on his bicycle, armored in his signature blue French workman’s jacket, his Nikon camera dangling around his neck, he discreetly photographed the most fashion-forward people in one of the world’s most stylish cities.
In addition to documenting street fashions, Mr. Cunningham also captured the culture of the city on camera and was one of the first photographers to document gay pride parades and AIDS awareness gatherings in the 1980s.
Physically unimposing and almost comically frugal, Mr. Cunningham was as much a character as anyone he photographed. The product of a devout Irish-Catholic family in Boston, he attended Harvard University only to confound expectations by quitting in 1948 after two months to focus on his interest in women’s hats.
He became a milliner and also worked at an exclusive dress shop in Manhattan whose clients included Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, and future first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. He befriended Kennedy, who turned to Mr. Cunningham after her husband’s assassination in 1963 for help dying a red Dior or Balenciaga suit — he could never remember which — a more somber color for the president’s state funeral.
‘‘There wasn’t time to get another suit so we dyed it black,’’ he told Harpers Bazaar in 2014.
Mr. Cunningham drifted in journalism at the behest of his society friends, writing about fashion for Women’s Wear Daily and other publications. A self-taught photographer, he began regularly contributing pictures to the Times in the 1970s.
As far as the editors were concerned, his breakthrough — apparently unintentional — was his 1978 picture of the actress Greta Garbo, the enigmatic movie star of the 1920s and 1930s who famously abandoned the screen for life as a recluse.
Enamored of Garbo’s nutria coat, Mr. Cunningham said he had barely noticed the woman herself when he took a photo of her on the streets of New York.
‘‘I thought: ‘Look at the cut of that shoulder. It’s so beautiful,’ ‘‘ he later wrote. ‘‘All I had noticed was the coat, and the shoulder.’’
At the Times, which he joined full time in 1993, Mr. Cunningham had two weekly photographic columns. ‘‘Evening Hours’’ focused on the city’s social and philanthropic scene, and ‘‘On the Street’’ captured the self-made fashions of stylish New Yorkers.
His photography of unpredictable fashion trends earned him a loyal following and made him internationally renowned as a trend-spotter.
‘‘I realized that you didn’t know anything unless you photographed the shows and the street, to see how people interpreted what designers hoped they would buy,’’ Mr. Cunningham said in the 2010 documentary film, ‘‘Bill Cunningham New York.’’
He said his favorite time to capture New Yorkers was when they were off guard, particularly in the rain or snow. He also enjoyed photographing unsuspecting fashionistas on their way to work in the morning.
‘‘You see how people really live and how they really dress,’’ he said.
William John Cunningham Jr. was born in Boston on March 13, 1929. He described his Irish-Catholic family as deeply religious and said his interest in fashion developed at church.
‘‘I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I'd be concentrating on women’s hats,’’ he wrote in an autobiographical column in the Times in 2002.
In middle school, he used bits of material he got from a dime store to put together hats, one of which he gave to his mother to wear to the New York World’s Fair in 1939. “She never wore it,’’ Mr. Cunningham once said. “My family all thought I was a little nuts.’’
He received a scholarship to Harvard only to drop out after two months. “They thought I was an illiterate,’’ Mr. Cunningham said, according to the Times. “I was hopeless — but I was a visual person.’’
He moved to New York to work as a hat designer, then as a fashion consultant at a custom dress boutique. He later opened a millinery shop under the name ‘‘William J’’ to save his family from embarrassment, he said.
He specialized in whimsical, avant-garde hatware — from a giant clamshell hat to feathery headpieces to turban-inspired toppers. A Times critic in 1958 noted that Mr. Cunningham had ‘‘cornered the face-framing market with some of the most extraordinarily pretty cocktail hats ever imagined.’’
After closing his shop in 1962, Mr. Cunningham began working in journalism, gradually switching from newspaper columns to photo spreads.
Mr. Cunningham resisted the trends of celebrity dressing. He had seen actresses in their fishtail dresses preening and posing before the phalanxes of photographers at the Golden Globes and the Oscars. They were poised. They looked pretty. Yet he simply could not muster enthusiasm for them.
Instead, he loved eccentrics. One was Shail Upadhya, whose work as a Nepalese diplomat is perhaps less memorable than his penchant for polka dots, Pucci prints, and other assorted peculiarities, like a self-designed floral-print coat made from his retired sofa. Another was Louise Doktor, an administrative assistant at a holding company who had a coat with four sleeves and a handbag made from a soccer ball.
“He had people who recurred in his columns,’’ Harold Koda, the former curator in charge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, told the Times. “Most of them were not famous. They were working people he was interested in. His thing was personal style.’’
Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, said: “To see a Bill Cunningham street spread was to see all of New York. Young people. Brown people. People who spent fortunes on fashion, and people who just had a strut and knew how to put an outfit together out of what they had and what they found.’’
In the documentary on his life, Mr. Cunningham was portrayed as old-fashioned and frugal. He refused to own a cellphone, a computer, or a television. He insisted on having his film developed at a one-hour photo store in Manhattan.
For six decades, he lived in a rent-controlled artist’s space in Carnegie Hall with no kitchen. He used a communal bathroom and slept in a cramped single bed that rested on filing cabinets filled with old negatives. In 2007, the Carnegie Hall Corp. announced plans to demolish the studios for rehearsal spaces, and Mr. Cunningham left for an apartment in Midtown.
He had no immediate survivors.
In 2008, Mr. Cunningham was honored by the French culture ministry with the Legion of Honor. As he stepped to the podium to accept his award, he was actively shooting the crowd of fashion officials.
‘‘It’s as true today as it ever was,’’ he said in his acceptance speech, his voice breaking. ‘‘He who seeks beauty will find it.’’
Material from The New York Times was used in this obituary.
