Fashion Climbing

by Bill Cunningham

  One afternoon while we were dabbling around the art department, Janet and I decided to give a showing of my hats. We requested an appointment with Mr. Rudolph, the president, then took a big Bonwit’s hatbox and pasted what we decided would be the designer’s name over the label. So my family wouldn’t get excited, I called myself “William J.,” leaving off my last name. We borrowed a black crepe Traina-Norell dress from the designers’ salon for Janet to wear, a slithery trumpet affair. From the fur department came a black fox scarf, which, combined with some long dangling jet earrings, made Janet the vampire model of all times. I wanted her to knock the president right off his chair. At the appointed hour we sashayed into his office, Janet swinging the borrowed fox and I the disguised hatbox. Mr. Rudolph was quite shocked at the getup. Janet looked more like a tart than an elegant lady, as the dress was a size too small and stretched tight over the fanny. The long earrings never stopped swinging, and that damned black fox hit me in the face each time Janet swung around for me to help her try on another hat.

  When the showing was over, Mr. Rudolph advised us to return the borrowed clothes and said the hatbox looked too familiar. As for the hats themselves, he gave me some of the best and kindest advice of my life: first, he said, to be an original creator, using only one’s own ideas would be the true way to happiness. He gently told me I’d been influenced by everything in the store, and that this was not the makings of a true designer’s signature. He advised me to make six new hats, using only my own thoughts, no matter how bad people might find them. He said they would represent a true “me.” This was to be the hardest lesson, that of throwing off outside influences and making definite designs of my own.

  The publicity department used one of the hats from this showing in some photographs they took for the Christian Science Monitor. I was really thrilled to see one of my hats in print, although no one ever asked to buy it. Soon after the showing, Mrs. Hoving, the wife of the owner, while at a party inquired about a friend’s hat. The lady said, “That darling little boy in your store made it.” Well, Mrs. Hoving didn’t know of any darling little boy making hats in their store, so she got on her high horse and found out that I was designing on Saturdays and selling the hats to Chez Ninon customers. Mrs. Hoving raised holy hell and had me fired from the store (a gesture for which I am eternally grateful, as it was the push I needed to start on my own). Nona and Sophie, who owned Chez Ninon, were so displeased at Mrs. Hoving’s action that they forbade her from entering their salon. The truth of the matter was, Mrs. Hoving was such a nagging customer, driving their fitters and tailors mad demanding a dozen fittings on each garment, that Nona and Sophie were thrilled to get rid of her.

  Just as I was thrown out of Bonwit’s, a fabulous masked ball on December 5, 1949, put me in a frenzy of creating elaborate masks where my imagination could fly to the world of make-believe. I produced almost fifty masks. All this was done while the maid and the cook hid me in the back room of the apartment. The night of the ball nearly drove my aunt and uncle into a hysterical battle, as the secretary of the air force’s wife, Mrs. Talbott, kept calling on the phone asking for more masks for her friends. Mrs. Talbott was a dear woman, and really helped me launch myself with all her society friends. She even took me to the ball and let me sit at her table as a guest. It was from this money made with the masks that I opened my own business the following day.

  The principal reason for me to start my own business was to bring happiness to the world by making women an inspiration to themselves and everyone who saw them. I wanted fashion to be happy—but oh my God, what an idealist I was! The road I was to travel was full of thorns, where women wanted to use fashion for impressing friends, climbing the social ladder, and everything but sheer enjoyment. Social climbing had been the big New York sport of the 1930s and ’40s, when swanky nightclubs became playgrounds for a once-private society. I immediately felt the new game was to be fashion climbing. As we had no king and queen of America, and no Duchesses of Texas nor Dukes of Brooklyn, there was only one possible distinction: FASHION. I felt rich women would embellish their social images by wearing designers’ fashion. The press, always looking for a new angle to report on Who’s Who with Whom, and Who’s Wearing What, gobbled up the new status of designer-label clothes. Fashion designers were to become raving celebrities equal to the past Hollywood queens. Jacques Fath and Christian Dior and most of the Paris designers became the prize property of every conquering social lioness. Fath was a sensation with all his parties, and his designs represented a spirit of joy that life had not known. In Paris, it mattered little who your ancestors were so long as you wore a Fath or Dior original. Fashion-climbing women were spiraling up the ladder at an alarming rate, to the dismay of the old names of the Social Register. Out of all this came what is known as the international society climbers, who weren’t satisfied with New York, Paris, or Rome but who established their conquests all over the world. American designers were slow in climbing, and not until the late 1950s did Norman Norell become the great American status symbol.

  Fashion designers who reach the top and slipcover the bodies of a generation must deeply feel the spirit of the times. It’s not just a little effective outward trimming that produces real talent but an inner mystical revelation that a designer brightens the world with.

  My First Shop

  In November of 1948, without the slightest idea of how to rent a shop—I never knew a thing about the Times rental section, I just thought you went along the street looking for empty windows, which is exactly what I did—wrapped in my fur-lined school coat and looking like I just got out of college, I went in and out of every building I saw with empty windows, inquiring for space. I decided my shop should be no further downtown than Hattie Carnegie’s on East Forty-Eighth Street, and no further uptown than Fifty-Seventh Street, somewhere between Park and Fifth Avenues. Oh, was I ever dumb and innocent! As I dashed into buildings, breathless with excitement, most of the people I met thought I was pulling a school prank. When I saw what appeared to be empty windows on the top floor of Hattie Carnegie’s, I walked right into the grand salon, where a frosty-eyed salesgirl said Hattie would be delighted to rent me the top rooms. She went on to say Hattie would be thrilled to see me, and she wrote down Hattie’s address, where I expected to be greeted with open arms. I was so sure of myself, and the three hundred dollars I had in my pocket made me feel I owned the world. With great dignity I rushed over to the address the salesgirl had given me, which turned out to be the insane asylum at Bellevue Hospital. I was so mad I could hardly see straight. Who did I think I was to just rush into Hattie Carnegie’s and rent the top floor?

  The next day, with fresh enthusiasm, the first rays of honest hope came with a charming little town house, 62 East Fifty-Second Street, formerly the residence of the mayor of New York around 1820, and a notorious speakeasy during the 1920s. As I walked up the front steps and entered the quaint Renaissance revival reception room—which looked down on a huge Hollywood-type medieval banquet hall with six desks on either side of a giant fireplace—a kind of moon-shaped face covered with freckles asked me what I wanted. The young lady of about twenty-eight turned out to be secretary to the six men who held offices in the three-story building. Her name was Kathy Keene. When I asked her about the empty windows on the top floor and my plan to open a millinery business, she thought I was a little mixed-up, but invited me to stay awhile and warm myself from the ten-degree cold outside. As we talked, she became more believing, and finally said to come back the following day, as there was a tiny attic room on the top floor that was empty. The second day, I was sitting on the doorstep when Miss Keene arrived to open the house. We had an hour before her bosses would come, so she briefed me on how to impress them, as they didn’t want to speak to some crazy kid about renting a room. Kathy was terrific; she told me to tell her boss the names of the women for whom I had just made masks, as her boss was a desperate social climber. Finally he arrived and called me into his office, but when I started tel
ling him about my plan to be the world’s greatest milliner and began naming some of my customers, the guy nearly fainted. He thought he’d caught a real live one. He figured he’d use me to meet all the ladies, so I was given the room.

  Up tiny, winding stairs, were the offices of a movie talent scout headed by the niece of David O. Selznick, and another office for TV productions where dozens of passé radio personalities from the 1920s and ’30s were desperately trying to make a comeback. On the top floor, a man in the front room wrote murder mysteries; he was a real spooky character. There, in the back of the house, was my first salon, a nine-by-twelve room with two large windows looking down to what once was an enchanted garden of fountains and statuary, now lying in despair after twenty years of neglect. Finally, we got down to the discussion of rent, which I wasn’t prepared to pay. The price was put at fifty dollars a month. I immediately said I couldn’t afford it but that I’d clean the house each morning before eight, for the use of the room. The owner was stunned by my unorthodox terms but decided he needed a cleaning man, and the deal was made. (Miss Keene, knowing I had little money, told me they needed a house cleaner.) Within two days I had left the glamour and comfort of Park Avenue for my garret, with just three hundred dollars in capital. I was a ten-cent millionaire, and immediately rushed out to the Salvation Army store, where I bought slightly moth-eaten Austrian drapes and Louis Bronx French furniture. I think the whole room was decorated for about thirty-five dollars. Wallowing in French chic, I started making my new hats.

  Separated from my glamorous salon by a three-panel cardboard screen that hid the workroom, I designed hats inspired by nature. Life-size apples hung on profile hats of red felt; daisies were wrapped around plaid duckbills, and a pixie cap of straw was molded into fruit shapes. These were truly happy times, and I waited quietly for my first client to come rushing up the narrow little stairway. But I must honestly say, they didn’t come breaking through the door, and my three hundred bucks disappeared. Finally, I took a job delivering lunches for a drugstore on the corner of Madison and Fifty-Second. For this I made tips and got a free lunch. Nothing was going to stop me; my happiest moments were spent making hats, and I was bound to succeed. At night I got a job as a barker on Broadway, at the Palace Vaudeville Theatre. After a few weeks in the freezing cold, I got myself moved inside, where the Saturday night audiences would give a few quarter tips for better seats. I stayed on this job for about four months and then moved on to the Howard Johnson’s restaurant across from Radio City, where I had lots to fill my stomach, and generous tips from the soda counter. My hours there were from five in the afternoon until two in the morning. In between all this, I designed the hats. The millinery supply houses were all kept busy counting out my payments, the piles of nickels and dimes I had made the previous night. I never felt ashamed of any job, so long as I could pay my bills with honest money, although my poor family was embarrassed. I guess I caused them a lot of heartaches, but I just felt I had to do it on my own.

  Each morning I was up at six o’clock cleaning the little brownstone mansion, then making hats, and occasionally having a customer sent by an old pal from Bonwit’s. I think the entrance into the dark house and the climb up the narrow little stairway scared the hell out of most of the ladies. On Sundays, I would roam the streets of New York, after early church, feasting my eyes on the wonderful window displays, which are perhaps the best free show in New York, always winding up my tour at the public library on Fifth Avenue. There I would spend the evening looking through old Vogue and Harper’s magazines, and their superb collection of costume books. I hadn’t seen a fashion magazine until I was seventeen; my family didn’t believe in such frivolities, and the closest thing to a fashion magazine was my sister’s movie magazines.

  * * *

  —

  I SHOWED MY FIRST PRESS collection in July 1949, working night and day to prepare fifty models, with the help of my first milliner, a darling quiet lady with an alcoholic sister who would arrive at the shop at the most unexpected moments, demanding money for whiskey. Wild scenes of screaming and fighting would often occur between the two sisters.

  The day of the showing arrived, with the press and hopefully many of the ladies I had made masks and fancy party hats for expected as guests. I was disappointed when the elegant ladies wouldn’t buy my hats. I soon realized they wanted only fashions similar to the big names of Paris but made more cheaply by an unknown. My designs were too original, and they were afraid of criticism and being thought of as coming from the wrong side of the tracks. The road of a true creator is a long, hard trail, with little recompense at first. It’s a bitter battle, but the promise of success in creating what you truly believe is so rewarding it makes the fashion ladder reach the gates of paradise.

  Meanwhile, on earth, I had use of the kitchen in the basement, as the steam kettle could get up much more steam over a gas stove than my garret’s hot plate. I needed the steam for hat making. One morning as I started the kettle huffing and puffing, to my surprise, baked beans came popping out of the spout. It seems one of the men in the house was on a bender and tried to cook lunch in my hat steamer. The people in the house were colorful, and anything could be expected. I was so naive I hardly knew what was going on between the bill collectors who were steadily filling the front office of the house, chasing most of the people who worked there, and the two men on the second floor who often displayed screaming tempers, scaring my sedate customers out of ever coming back. On one occasion, while I was fitting a deep cloche hat on a very timid Park Avenue woman, the cops raided the second floor, and the two men scrambled over the garden wall to adjoining Fifty-Third Street.

  On another occasion, one of the movie producers, who was being hotly pursued by the sheriff, came in late one night to gather all her belongings with the help of a now famous and respected movie actor. They were escaping to California, but before leaving decided to take what they thought was an antique. It was a bidet in the second-floor bathroom, and these two damned fools got ahold of the fire hatchet and began chopping the lead plumbing. In the midst of gushing of water, I woke up to see a waterfall flowing down the spiral stairway, pooling in several feet of water down below.

  Despite all the wild carryings-on, my first show got off to a grand start. The old garden and the big Renaissance hall were lent to me for my showing, as all the people who worked in the room were hoping to meet my customers. I was also allowed to use the dirty garden, and found myself very happily cleaning it and arranging big bunches of peonies in glass light globes I had taken off the unused ceiling fixtures, which I planted in the sooty ground. The center fountain was cleaned out, and palms sprouted from its spout. The gals at Bonwit’s modeled the hats. Of the seventy-five hoped-for guests, only six customers came, all hatted in my latest whims, and of the press, only one appeared, but she was the most influential and important in all New York: Virginia Pope of the New York Times. Most people would have thought the tiny audience a disaster, but I felt the queen herself was there, and no one else mattered. She graciously sat through the whole show, when I’m sure she could have used her time elsewhere. The next day a tiny paragraph appeared on the Times fashion page proclaiming a new designer. This was the most important encouragement, and gave me reason to fight on—and what a fight it was!

  One Fourth of July weekend, I remember having nothing to eat except a jar of Ovaltine, of which I rationed three spoonfuls a day. When I would feel the pangs of hunger, I would go out looking in store windows and feed myself on beautiful things. Particularly filling were the windows of decorator Rose Cumming, whose shop was on the corner of Fifty-Third and Madison. I would press my nose flat on the windowpane, looking at the most inspiring taste I had ever seen. Everything was different and unusual: I had never seen the likes of her materials, colors, and combinations. And then in the midst of all this exotic decor would be Rose Cumming herself, with her purple hair and a tiger-printed dress. I never met the lady until years later, but in those hungry days her shop wo
uld give me the burning desire to run home and create new hats. On weekends when the men who owned the house on Fifty-Second Street were away, Miss Keene would call me as soon as they left, and we would set up a millinery display in the first-floor window, removing their business signs. One weekend things got so desperate, I hung six hats on the city lamppost outside the house, and to everyone’s surprise, sold several of them to a doctor’s wife who was walking down the street in despair over her sad life. Seeing the hats on the lamppost seemed to give her a ray of sunshine, and she dashed into the house to inquire about them. She always claimed the hats saved her from committing suicide.

  On other weekends, I would hock my bicycle in a Third Avenue pawnshop so I could eat, or buy supplies for hats. The bicycle was my only way of delivering hats around the city, often pedaling up Park Avenue with the hatboxes dangling from the handlebars.

  One Friday night I got an order for two hats but didn’t have any money to buy material. The bicycle was already in hock, and the money had gone to save a bouncing check at the bank, so Miss Keene pawned her boss’s typewriter and gave me the twenty dollars to complete the hats. Later, her boss made an unexpected return visit to the office, and Miss Keene very quickly threw two telephone books under the typewriter cover.

  We couldn’t afford labels for the hats, so I would spend my spare time gracefully painting the name William J. over three-inch squares of linen, clipped with pinking shears. In the fall of 1949 a miracle occurred: my star ascended, as one Miss Elizabeth Griffin, the daughter of Madame Shoumatoff (the lady who was painting Roosevelt’s portrait when he died), came to my shop and liked the hats. The next day she returned with two other ladies. One was Mrs. William Hale Harkness, the multimillionairess of Standard Oil. The ladies decided they wanted to set me up in business, with three thousand dollars they had made on a small investment in the hit musical Guys and Dolls.