Bill Cunningham, the legendary New York Times fashion photographer, died on Saturday. The eighty-seven-year old had been hospitalized recently for a stroke. Jacob Bernstein writes for the New York Times that “Cunningham operated both as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and as an unlikely cultural anthropologist, one who used the changing dress habits of the people he photographed to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.”

Born in Boston in 1929, Cunningham’s love of fashion started at an early age. “I could never concentrate on Sunday church services because I’d be concentrating on women’s hats.” The accessory would later become his passion—in the 1950s he would drop out of Harvard to open a millinery store, William J., on Fifty-Second Street between Madison and Park Avenue. He refrained from using his surname, claiming his family members “were very shy people.” After being drafted for the Korean War, he began working for the Chicago Tribune and Women’s Wear Daily. He eventually joined the New York Times, where he was a contributor for over four decades, developing such columns as “On the Street” and “Evening Hours.”

Cunningham helped popularize street-style fashion photography, and he could often be seen hopping off his bicycle, which he rode for more than thirty years, while pedaling around Manhattan. The beloved photographer was awarded the Legion d’Honneur in 2008, named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2009, and was the subject of the documentary film, Bill Cunningham New York, which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. In the film, Anna Wintour said, “I’ve said many times that we all get dressed for Bill.”

In a review of Bill Cunningham New York for Artforum’s February 2011 issue, Amy Taubin wrote that Cunningham—the forerunner to today’s fashion bloggers—produced one of “three extensive, unofficial imagistic histories of New York City,” the other two being Jonas Mekas’s 16-mm diaries and Warhol’s multimedia oeuvre. “[He wore] a chipper smile and evasive body language like armor, which is precisely how he thinks of fashion,” Taubin writes, quoting Cunningham: “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don’t think you could do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization.”