Fashion of The Gilded Age
As chronicled by the Golden Age photographer Bill Cunningham
Riding the crest of high ratings, the finale of Season 3 of The Gilded Age screens this Sunday. The series stars our former neighbor Carrie Coon, and mostly follows the wealthy upper crust of NYC and Newport (rich people gonna rich), but the show has also hit upon the issues of racial inequality, workers’ rights, and women’s suffrage, encapsulating the titular term to describe that era, which was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner for a novel they co-wrote in 1873.
This week, we also got a 1978 book called Facades. The book is full of staged photos shot by Bill Cunningham and combines “his knowledge of, and interest in, architecture and fashion with an insatiable desire to document everything.”
Stay with me; these two things are related.
Cunningham was the French workers smock-wearing, bicycling fashion and society photographer for the New York Times for nearly 40 years. Facades is the culmination of an eight-year project utilizing a large collection of vintage and historical clothing he had amassed. The concept of the project was to photograph a model (his neighbor Editta Sherman, known as the “Duchess of Carnegie Hall”) in these costumes “in correct historical settings and to compare architectural and fashion design and construction… [His] success at matching the appropriate costume with the right location came as much from study as from intuition. Each location was carefully documented and dated through the many books available on the subject and through the files of the city's architectural records.”
These images from the book, show fashion from the Gilded Age, framed by facades of edifices built during that same period.
One final note: if you have not yet seen the documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, we highly recommend it. Cunningham not only had a keen eye for fashion, framing, and facades, he was by most counts, also an exceptionally good human. I would also argue that his NYT photo collage/column “On the Streets,” epitomized the Golden Age of keen, fashion trend reporting.