All Aboard Tito’s Train: A Dictator’s Time Capsule of Luxury Travel

In today’s internet rabbit hole adventure, I ventured far from home and ended up on a Serbian website for filming locations. To my surprise, one of the locations for hire just so happened to be an ex-dictator’s private luxury train. Sitting in a rather rundown warehouse in Belgrade, the luxurious Blue train was custom-designed in…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLII)

1. Paris Dead Ends Paris has over 600 dead end streets. Photographer Karin Borghouts began photographing the pedestrian streets of Paris in 2011. Her Paris Impasse photo book shows more than 200 dead ends, from the 1st to the 20th arrondissements. The photos offer a view of Paris that is normally not noticed. Found via…

The Greatest Open Air (and floating) Show on Earth

Our return to the world of theatre can’t come soon enough, but there is one stage in particular that should be right up there on your bucket list. The Bregenz Festival is home to the world’s largest floating stage, built in epic proportions since 1946 on Lake Constance in Austria. If you’re not a fan of…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLI)

1. Fran Lebowitz & Iman for French Vogue, 1983 Photographed by Antony Armstrong Jones and styled by Andre Leon Talley. Found on Tumblr. 2. Russia’s Lost crown jewels of the Imperial Family Collected during the Romanov dynasty, beginning with the reign of Peter the Great, personally owned by members of the extended Romanov family and by…

Preserved Moments of Historical, Indisputable Black Style

I haven’t done one of these style compendiums in a while, so this is long overdue. And this is also for all those internet retrospectives on vintage style that don’t include a single Black face. It was a hard task narrowing down my favourites from thousands of found snapshots floating around out there on the world…

Curiosity du Jour: Antique Intaglio Seals

When we stopped writing letters, it wasn’t just our penmanship that went down the toilet, but the entire art of letter-writing, and all the romance and ceremony that came with it. Arguably the loveliest victim to have disappeared from our desks in the wake of its decline? The intaglio seal. Intaglio seals, essentially engraved gems,…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DL)

1. Found in a French mansion in that was shuttered for a century A late 19th-century French mansion shuttered for more than a century has opened its doors to the public, revealing an array of outdated luxuries and oddities. The house once belonged to the wealthy, philanthropic, and “egocentric” civil servant Louis Mantin… who died…

A Brief Compendium of Historical Maximalism

This is a case for “more is more”, masterfully argued by the brushstrokes of history’s finest interiors artists. Before we had glossy decor magazines to pour over, we had a pictorial genre known as interior portraiture which became all the rage during the Belle Epoque, but first appeared in Europe in the 17th century to…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DXLIX)

1. Queen Victoria’s Boer War chocolate found in attic A 121-year-old chocolate bar that was given to British troops to boost morale during the Boer Wars in South Africa has been discovered in the attic of a National Trust property. The chocolate, still in its original wrapper and tin, was part of a batch commissioned…

Hidden Under a Chicken Coop: The “Louvre” of Wine

One of the world’s most prestigious wine cellars isn’t where you think it might be. It isn’t nestled beneath a grand chateau or presidential palace, but buried in the backyard of an average Joe, a retiree of humble background who has been collecting the rarest wines, bottle by bottle for the past 50 years. Michel-Jack…