Precursor to the Blog: Style Hound Bill Cunningham

Every now and again it is good to have a history lesson. And if you know anything at all about fashion or street style blogs, you need to know that the grand daddy of them all began in December 1978 in the New York Times, by a great servant to fashion, Mr Bill Cunningham. It is very difficult to find out much about this man, so let me share a few details with you that I have come across in dribs and drabs over the past couple of years.

He is a man in his 60s and has covered all the New York shows and evening society events for about three decades. He knows everyone and everyone in the industry knows him, and yet he is physically unremarkable and his name will probably escape many. He dresses in the same outfit pretty much every day, looking more like the post boy he once was, rather than a fashion correspondent.

He has a glorious turn of phrase that is at once reflective of an era gone by, and highly engrossing even today. A trench coat is 'swell' a young woman on the street is a 'muffin' and his disparaging remarks about the wealthy who place style over substance will forever be remembered. A feat in a man who has given over his life to recording and reporting on fashion in the way that a nun gives over her life to God.

Living like a nun, too, with extremely spartan habits and clothes only to lend him the invisibility of a photographer - he insists that the focus is on the subject, and absolutely never on him.

For him, there are three rules if you are to know anything at all about fashion. They are that you need to see the designer shows, you need to go into the stores to see what the buyers have selected from the shows, and then for the greatest lesson of all you need to go out on the street and see what people are wearing and how they have put it together. And it is following the third of these that took him out onto the streets of New York to put together picture stories for the Sunday print edition and eventually slide shows, with his voice over, for the New York Times online. It was these that were the original and, some may argue still, the best street style blogs. Only in a time before the intergalactic webatron existed.

Spending over 30 hours a week on the streets taking photographs of the trendy and the rich in equal measure, Bill Cunningham has an eye for a trend or a cut. He is not a fussy photographer and his style is bang-on straight forward with no affectations. As ever, the purpose of his photo is to capture the garment and report on a trend, not to profile the person nor to communicate anything about himself.

You can go and look at the latest of his audio slide shows at The New York Times and make sure you know where we have all come from, and the legacy that we carry with us each day. I have been meaning to write about him for ages, but was inspired by a rare photo that The Sartorialist managed to snap of him yesterday.

Lesson is now over for today.