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Category / Art & Design Awesomeness

Forget Louboutin, Step into the World of André Perugia, the True Icon behind Modern Shoe Design

You name an avant-garde brand of note – Saint Laurent, Rick Owens, Moschino, Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Jacquemus – and chances are they’ve been overtly influenced by a shoe designer extraordinaire, André Perugia. Cage heels, no heels, disappearing heels, under-slung heels, corkscrew heels, float-in-the-air heels, needle-thin fetish heels – you name it, if they’re…

What Happened to Picasso’s Mysterious Teenage Muse?

For a few Spring months in 1954, a melancholy Picasso found himself enraptured by 19-year-old Sylvette David. Of all the muses who bookmarked his life — and there were many — she’s fallen to the wayside of history as one of the most enigmatic and misunderstood. For years, critics wrote the body of work she…

Who were the Monets of Japan? The Impressionist Movement your Art History Class Forgot

What happens when a samurai puts down his sword, and picks up a paintbrush? In 1868, feudal Japan was steamrolled by a new decade known as the Meiji Restoration. Western influences flooded every crevice of the country’s social fabric, but arguably the most fascinating battle between “old” and “new” Japan took place on canvas. Suddenly,…

Inside a Secret Paris Atelier of Curiosities

Behind what might be the narrowest door in Paris, at the back of a peaceful courtyard, I could hear the faint sound of a radio crackling as I approached the end of a corridor, hoping I’d found the atelier of Maïssa Toulet. I had found a photograph of her work on Tumblr and tracked her…

Memories of a Lost Valley: 5,000 Photographs Discovered in an Attic

Between 1900 and 1930, a poor and destitute seed pedlar took more than five thousand photographs of daily life in an isolated valley of the Italian-speaking Swiss territory to the south of the Alps. Roberto Donetta can now be considered one of Swiss photography’s great outsider artists, but when he died in debt, solitude and misery in 1932,…

Twisted Treasures: The Quirky World of Telephone Cord Bag Collecting

We love a fashion moment wrapped in a mystery, which is precisely what happened when fate, or chance, or whatever, first brought us to our dream handbag. There, in the sea musty bins at the Brooklyn Flea, it glimmered: a purse made up of cream coloured coils…dare we say, telephone cords? It was bold, campy,…

The Inexplicably Fascinating Secret World of Thomasson

“Thomasson: noun \ to-ma-son \ a preserved architectural relic which serves no purpose”. We’ve all come across an example at one time or another– probably didn’t give it too much thought and surely had no idea these random urban oddities actually had a name, let alone an entire movement dedicated to observing them as conceptual art. That’s right, art. People have…

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…

Our Zoom Date with Wes Anderson’s Sign Painters

It feels like a lifetime ago that were spying on the film set for The French Dispatch, desperate for a glimpse of the movie magic that Wes and his team of talented elves were busy creating in the French town of Angoulême. Alas, the much-anticipated film finally made it to cinemas and we scored ourselves…

Remember that time the Motion Picture was Invented (and Everyone was Naked)?

One of my favourite things about Eadweard Muybridge, the man who gave us the moving image, aside from the vast array of exotic spellings he adopted for his birth name (Edward Muggeridge), is the idea of him travelling around the American wild west in a 19th century carriage which he converted into his very own…

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