15 49.0138 8.38624 both 0 bullet 0 4000 1 0 horizontal https://www.messynessychic.com 300 4000

Category / Editor’s Picks

10 Clues to Unlock Paris

You should have seen the MessyNessy office today, because boy, was it living up to its messy name (get a behind the scenes look here on Insta stories). It was pretty ironic since the goal was to shoot my new book, surrounded by ‘things organised neatly’. So that’s what you’re about to see: ten very tidy portraits of…

The Hidden Speakeasy Room found at Pixar Studios where Steve Jobs Hung Out

At the Redbull headquarters, you can take a carbon slide down to the ground floor instead using the stairs, at Google you can sit around and talk strategy in ski gondolas, but at the Pixar offices, there’s something special that didn’t require all the big budget bells & whistles to count the animation company amongst the coolest workplaces on earth. Did you hear…

The Girl with the Impossible Waist

If you look up “hourglass figure” in the dictionary, Betty Brosmer’s picture should probably be next to it (if you Google it, she’s right there next to Kim Kardashian). Meet the highest paid pin-up girl of the 1950s, considered by many as the first true supermodel, Betty appeared in thousands of magazine including LIFE, Time, Fortune,…

Inside the Mansfield Mansion

It just doesn’t get much more kitsch (or pink) than screen siren Jayne Mansfield’s Sunset Boulevard home circa 1960. Floor to ceiling shag carpets, heart-shaped swimming pool, fireplaces and bathtubs, gold-plated fixtures a plenty, and of course, pink f**king everything. Photographed by LIFE photographer Allan Grant in 1960, the mid 20th century sex symbol shows…

Celebrity Icons and their Favourite Summer Book

So you might have heard I wrote a little book called “Don’t be a Tourist in Paris” and I was in need of some early feedback, so I sent it out to just a few of my close contacts. As you can see, it looks like they all really seem to be enjoying it! I think it’s going…

The First Miss Universe Pageant, 1952

Beauty pageants are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. We all know they’re silly and superficial but does anyone else here count Drop Dead Gorgeous as one of their favourite comedies from the 90s? What I like about this photo series that I pulled out of the trusty LIFE archives, is the behind-the-scenes element…

The Lost Desert Libraries of Chinguetti

The sands of the Sahara have all but swallowed Chinguetti, a near ghost town found at the end of a harsh desert road in Mauritania, West Africa. Its majority of abandoned houses are open to the elements, lost to the dunes of a desert aggressively expanding southward at a rate of 30 miles per year.…

Unmasking the Parisian Phantom of the Opera

What if I told you there is a lake under the Paris Opera House, just like in The Phantom of the Opera? Down, down, down, deep underneath the Garnier Opera in a dingy room with a square-shaped hole in the middle, I found it. Resting in the hole was a ladder that seemed to be descending into…

North Korean Interiors Looking Suspiciously like a Wes Anderson Film Set

I‘m quite sure this room reminds me of a new design restaurant I went to recently and thought was so cool, that I didn’t really care what the food tasted like or how much they were charging me for “locally-sourced rice”. Slowly but surely, we seem to be moving from the old world Parisian café replicas and small town general…

The Art of Squatting in Underground Paris Galleries

I first met one of the founders of Madame Lupin in the Paris catacombs on Halloween one year, sharing a bottle of red wine, squatting on some ancient limestone. He told me about the secret gourmet picnics he liked to organise in abandoned chateaux around the city. He then met a girl who worked in…

NEWER POSTS 1 … 151 152 153 … 190 OLDER POSTS