Iconic New York Times Fashion Photographer Bill Cunningham Dies at 87

Bill Cunningham, the legendary New York Times photographer who chronicled decades of changing fashions on city streets through his lens, died Saturday. He was 87.

Cunningham had been hospitalized Thursday after suffering a stroke. At the time of his hospitalization, a Times spokesperson told Page Six Cunningham had the entire fashion community pulling for his recovery.

Recognizable to both fashion elite and the common man in his blue jacket, khaki pants and black sneakers, Cunningham worked for the paper for 40 years. In the New York Times obituary, he was memorialized as a cultural icon while also being a simple man who hated attention and being in the public eye. He was regularly seen during the day at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street.

Cunningham's Times column, "On The Street," became a staple in the paper soon after he showed photos he had taken of Greta Garbo, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Farah Fawcett and the king and queen of Spain to an editor at the Times. Cunningham did not recognize Garbo or Fawcett as he did not own a television set, according to a New Yorker profile.

The profile called the column along with his separate society column, “Evening Hours,” New York's high-school yearbook.

In a 2002 interview, Cunningham said he always tried to be as discreet as possible to get more natural pictures. He said he was a record keeper more than he was a collector.

"We all dress for Bill," Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour once said.

Cunningham was the subject of the 2010 documentary film, "Bill Cunningham New York," which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art. He was honored with the Legion d'Honneur in France, and a life-size mannequin of him stands in the window of Bergdorf Goodman in New York City. He was named a "Living Landmark" by the New York Landmark Conservancy and awarded a Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence in 2012.

Cunningham was born in Boston in 1929 to an Irish-Catholic family. He moved to New York after dropping out of Harvard where he began his career freelancing with Women's Wear Daily and became a regular contributor with the Times by the late '70s.

Read the full New York Times obituary for Bill Cunningham here.

See some of Cunningham's photography via the Times here.

The fashion world mourned the legend's passing.

Image by Jiyang Chen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons