YOUTH NOW
My Childhood in the Closet With My Mother’s Clothing
An excerpt from Bill Cunningham’s posthumous memoir
My first remembrance of fashion was the day my mother caught me parading around our middle-class Catholic home in a lace-curtain Irish suburb of Boston. There I was, 4 years old, decked out in my sister’s prettiest dress. Women’s clothes were always much more stimulating to my imagination. That summer day, in 1933, as my back was pinned to the dining room wall, my eyes spattering tears all over the pink organdy full-skirted dress, my mother beat the hell out of me and threatened every bone in my uninhibited body if I wore girls’ clothes again.
My dear parents gathered all their Bostonian reserve and decided the best cure was to hide me from any artistic or fashionable life. This wasn’t hard in suburban Boston; a drab puritanical life prevailed, brightened only by Christmas, Easter, the Thanksgiving Day parade, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and the maypole costume party in kindergarten. My life was lived for each of these special days when I could express all the fancy thoughts in my head.
Of course, Christmas was the blowout of the year, and I started wrapping the packages months before anyone dreamed of another Christmas. The tree ornaments were packed away in the attic, where I usually dusted them off with a trial run in midsummer and prepared a plan of decoration for the coming season.
When Christmas came, I must have redecorated the tree a half dozen times in the short week it was left to stand, and when New Year’s Day arrived and the tree was to be thrown out on the street, a deep depression usually set upon me, as I tucked all the glamour, the shiny tinsel, away for another eternally long year, and only the thought of Valentine’s Day with its lace-trimmed displays of love made life bearable.
There I was, 4 years old, decked out in my sister’s prettiest dress.
Easter Sunday was always a high point. I can remember every one of Mother’s hats, which were absolute knockouts to my eyes, but when I look back today, they were all very conservative. My two sisters and brother Jack (who was all sports-minded) and I were outfitted in new clothes…
