Bill Cunningham New York and the political potentiality of the fashion documentary

Abstract

This article draws on Walter Benjamin’s theories of modernity and fashion to theorize the political potentiality of popular documentary film Bill Cunningham New York (Press, 2010). The article begins with a theoretical consideration of the relationship between photography and fashion in modernity. This discussion of the material and immaterial constraints and aptitudes of each artistic medium clears the space for a Benjaminian analysis of fashion photography’s singular characteristics. The article then moves on to posit an immanent political charge in what can be termed the fashion documentary film genre; a political charge that grows out of the genre’s preoccupation with what Benjamin calls phantasmagoric society. Finally, the article takes a closer look at Bill Cunningham New York, and, using this film as a case study, teases out some of its contradictory political gestures at once revolving around a radically democratic notion of fashion, yet falling back onto a hierarchic structure of social value based on cultural elitism.