Through Bill Cunningham’s Lens, the Glitz and Drama of an Era-Defining Fashion Show

Just a powdered-and-perfumed hair over 200 years later, what photographer Bill Cunningham described in his diary as “the miniature blue, gold and pink opera house of carved wood” again served as backdrop to an occasion of glittering excess and cultural shift—a much-photographed unlikely interrogation of race and class, presented anew in Rizzoli’s The Battle of Versailles: The Fashion Showdown of 1973. Compiled by Mark Bozek, who became acquainted with Cunningham’s archives while making his 2018 feature documentary, The Times of Bill Cunningham, the book collects the shots by that beloved chronicler of American fashion, many of them previously unpublished, alongside those of his French counterpart and friend, Jean-Luce Huré. The collection offers a lively and multifaceted glimpse of the moment that, as model Pat Cleveland puts it in her introduction to the book, “the Americans captured fashion leadership from the city of Paris.”

Cleveland was one of 36 models who arrived at Orly on the morning of Sunday, November 24, fresh-faced and punchy from JFK, and ready to compete in an opulent charity fashion show that would pit five French designers against five Americans. For the former, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Emanuel Ungaro, Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, and Hubert de Givenchy, with performances by Rudolf Nureyev, Jane Birkin, and Josephine Baker. For the latter, performances by Liza Minnelli bookended presentations by Oscar de la Renta, Stephen Burrows, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, and a volatile Halston (who, as the critic Robin Givhan recalled in her erudite and entertaining 2015 book on the occasion, had recently begun narrating himself in the third person and proceeded to yell “Halston is leaving!” as he crashed out of a rehearsal).

The pomp and personalities were ripe for Cunningham, whom Cleveland remembers as being “like Fellini with a still camera” and who referred to himself not as a photographer but rather a fashion historian. “Bill could charm you into wanting to have your picture taken, whether you felt like it or not!” Minnelli writes in her foreword to the book. “His photographs are poetry in motion, singing the symphony of the streets and the secret whisperings of the soirées.”