"You're A Lumberjack, and Here I'm Talking Dresses To You."

What's better than octogenarians with an eye for style? How about an octogenarian who's one of the original artists living in the Carnegie Hall studios in New York City? (By the way, the resident artists' eviction from Carnegie Hall in 2010 is the topic of a fascinating documentary.) But I'm soapboxin' about this particular film: Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary that came out March 2011 about New York Times fashion photographer (and all around awesome old guy) Bill Cunningham. I'd been waiting to see it forever, and it's now available on Netflix!

When it comes to fashion, Bill is not interested in celebrity and spectacle, but rather how ordinary people transform their style into something notable, interesting, and weird. At one point, Bill talks about the old days of Carnegie Hall: "Ginger Rogers used to come, and Joan Crawford. Marilyn Monroe was one. And I had no interest because they weren't stylish."
Who does he find stylish? Turns out that some of Bill's favorite fashionistas to photograph are marvelous (and super eccentric) old ladies like Anna Piaggi and Iris Apfel.

"It's really hard to describe one's self because I think one lives very often in other people's visions. I see myself as the world's oldest living teenager because I have such a good time, and I try to get as much of a kick out of things as possible." - Iris Apfel (Screen capture from BIll Cunningham New York)

Good ol' Bill is the epitome of down-to-earth. He's an unpretentious lover of fashion who has devoted his life to his work, so much so that in a very personal moment in the documentary, he admits he has never had a romantic relationship - he simply never had the time.
I think for any other old man, you'd feel sad about his lifelong lack of romance, but Bill is such an optimist that you can't feel anything but endeared and amused.

"This used to be my old sofa, this jacket. And the pants used to be my ottoman." - Shail Upadhya, a style favorite of Bill Cunningham's. (Screen capture from BCNY.)

Movie rec? Definitely. You just can't go wrong with a guy who lives in a cramped studio chock-full of file cabinets containing his life's work, and who goes around saying things like: "Who the hell wants a kitchen and a bathroom? It's just more rooms to clean." Or alternately, "I just like fashion as an art form of dressing the body. If we all went out looking like a slob like me, it'd be a pretty dreary world."