The Art of Love, by a Time Travelling Impressionist Painter

“Wait, is that a Degas? A Cassatt?” is probably something Ron Hicks gets a lot. As a contemporary artist, Hicks’ talent for blending Impressionist and abstract techniques will make you do a double take, as his languid, cafe lovers could just as easily be mid-embrace circa 1870 or 2017. And the same goes for his…

Where are the Black Archeologists?

“Why are there so few Black American archeologists?” asked Maria Franklin in response to a landmark 1997 survey which found that only 2 out of 1500 Archeological respondents identified as Black. Years later, the status of her question posed in a paper published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015 – and its answer –…

Where Is Surrealism Going in These Strange-and-Uncertain Times?

Traditionally, Surrealism is born from confrontation. Confrontation of war, gender norms, existentialism – you name it, Salvador Dali probably addressed it with a melting clock. Given that the 20th century movement emerged from this unflinching dive into the human experience as psyche, we started wondering: where has Surrealism taken us in 2020? In the midst…

I Accidentally Accumulated the World’s Largest Archive of ’80s Esprit Merch

Ask any ’80s and ’90s kid at heart, and they’ll tell you: Esprit just did it right. The colour-blocking sportswear, the street-casted campaigns, the cutting-edge collaborations with designers that defined the ’80s. Even the brand’s commitment to environmentalism was so ahead of its time. “Esprit was an ethos,” says Michelle Koza, the woman behind the largest…

The Strange Anatomy of ABBA’s Infamous (Tax Deductible) Wardrobe

What do house cats, Euro pop, and the ingenious tax savvy have in common? Owe Sandström, that’s who. As the flamenco-dancing-zoologist-designer behind the costumes of ABBA, Sandström certainly played his part in helping the Swedish supergroup reach fame in the 1970s – where they have remained ever since. In fact, a deeper dive into the…

Before Playboy, Came “La Vie Parisienne”

A pair of clandestine, gender-bending lovers are about to embrace at la brasserie. A fashionable young woman in a barely-there dress is partying the night away in the cabarets of Paris without a care (or a man) in the world to ruin her fun. A curious eye would be intrigued by the risqué illustrations of…

Remembering NYC’s ‘Secret’ 82 Drag Club

Bedazzled drag queens, mobsters, and Errol Flynn playing a piano with his errr … manhood? It was just another Saturday night at NYC’s “82 Club,” c. 1955. Tucked inside a nondescript door at 82 East 4th Street in Manhattan, “82” declared itself the “gayest rendez-vous”on the town in every sense of the word, falling somewhere…

Let’s House Hunt for that All-American Utopian Commune. Just in Case.

We do love a good plunge into worlds apart – filled with utopian goat herding, secret society conspiracies and hippies living off-grid on the fringes of society. Of course, the line between commune and cult is famously slippery and plagued with crackpot messiah tendencies. The more modern and optimistic term for the idea of a…

The Radical History of Women Smoking

We don’t really need a reminder of just how bad smoking is for us. Bad for our physical health, the environment, and cringe-worthy on so many social justice levels. Why is it then, that women always looked so damn cool smoking their cigarettes in vintage photographs? There’s a complicated blend between our lifetime exposure to…

Doomsday Prepping in the Belle Epoque

Ah, to have planned for a comet apocalypse in the Belle Epoque! Looks like a wild time, according to all the 19th and 20th century postcards with folks soaring through the skies, bum over noggin, towards a starry death. Out of all the (ultimately) anti-climactic close comet calls, the 1910 approach of Halley’s Comet takes…