Paris When It Sizzled

IN 1973, FIVE AMERICAN DESIGNERS AND 36 MODELS DESCENDED ON THE CITY OF LIGHT FOR WHAT WOULD BECOME AN ERA-DEFINING FASHION SHOW-AND WITH THEM WAS PHOTOGRAPHER BILL CUNNINGHAM. HERE, AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT HIS TREASURE TROVE OF LARGELY UNSEEN PHOTOS, PUBLISHED TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME

- KEZIAH WEIR

IN 1770, THE wedding reception of Marie Antoinette and the dauphin inaugurated the frescoed and gilded Royal Opera at the Palace of Versailles-then the largest performance venue in France-a decadent celebration of what turned out to be, for the French monarchy, the beginning of the end.

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of Bill Cunningham, the book collects the shots by that beloved chronicler of American fashion, many of them previously unpublished, alongside those of his French counterpart and friend, JeanLuce Huré.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.”