New York Times Photographer Bill Cunningham’s William J. Hats Are For Sale
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Mr. Cunningham was a milliner before he became a noted style photographer. Eight of his one-of-a-kind hats are now up for auction.
Before Bill Cunningham rode his bicycle around the city taking photos of fashionable New Yorkers for The New York Times, he helped dress some of them as William J., the milliner.
Along with socialites and Old Hollywood stars — Doris Duke, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe and Ginger Rogers among them — his fans included people like Venera Macaluso of Queens, who died in 2018 and went by Netty. Eight of her one-of-a-kind hats designed by Mr. Cunningham are now up for auction as part of a sale ending on March 21.
Styles on the block include a hat resembling a small purple pancake with silk lilies of the valley sprouting from it, a fascinator with stars in gold sequins and black velvet, and a hat with a grasshopper-like bug perched atop flouncy layers of neutral tone silk chiffon.
At the time Mr. Cunningham was making the hats, some sold for $35 and others for $65, he wrote in his memoir, “Fashion Climbing.” Bids at the time of publication ranged from about $150 to $250.
After Mrs. Macaluso died at 93, her son Robert J. Macaluso found the hats on a shelf in her closet. Mr. Macaluso, 72, a retired salesman at the textile house Scalamandré who is now a deacon at Saint Margaret Parish in Madison, Conn., then stored them in tissue paper in his garage.
