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Category / Indie Shopper

A Brief Compendium of the Traveling Salesman’s Vintage Sample Case

Unlike most of the vintage stuff we tend to get nostalgic about on this blog, I’m not sure travelling salesmen of yesteryear rapping their knuckles on our front doors is something we’d necessarily want to bring back. While I do like to touch and feel what I’m buying, briefcase-carrying bowler hat-wearing door to door sellers hawking…

Forgotten Object du Jour: The Vinaigrette

Pass the vinaigrette! No, not the salad dressing – we’re talking about the vinaigre de toilette. You’re forgiven for the confusion, being born in the wrong century and all. Let’s rewind about 150 years when a vinaigrette once commonly referred to a small container for smelling salts or aromatic vinegar that were used to cover…

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,…

A Brief Compendium of Curiosity Shops

It’s not quite a junk shop, but it’s too informal to count as an antique store. While there may be books, it’s not a book store either, and calling it a thrift store feels wrong. There’s little to definitively categorise or unify its oddities. Much easier to pinpoint is the origin of the phrase “curiosity…

Digging for Treasure (and Love) in New York City

Their’s is a love of strange and beautiful proportion. The kind measured in porcelain, peanut-sized dolls, and antiqued oysters as big as your face. “It’s hard to imagine a time when we’d stop digging,” says Belle, back-lit by a wall of technicolour glass bottles, “I mean it’s addictive. And when you have someone who gets…

13 Cheap, Last Minute and Actually Good DIY Gift Ideas

From D.I.Y. TO “I.O.U”, here is a round-up of the best and cheapest gift last-minute ideas out there. For just about anyone: A “Gift Bucket”… Stock it with personalised little surprises according to the person’s taste and personality. You can find the lanterns or buckets at most supermarkets/ gardening/ homeware stores for as little as…

The Messy Nessy Personality-Curated Gift Guide

“Remember, the big stores don’t do ‘a little Jig’ when they make a sale. Make someone ‘jig’ this year.” I’ve always put a lot of thought into finding unique gifts at the holidays and if you’re a long-time reader, chances are we probably share similar tastes. So without further ado, let’s go gift-shopping… For the…

Magical & Macabre Spell Ingredients to throw in your Cauldron this Halloween

We’re looking for a most powerful spell this year. Forget the “eye of newt” and “wool of bat” – to get in the spirit of Halloween, we’ve trawled our favourite curio corners of the net to find some alternative oddities to get our cauldrons a’ bubbling this year. In the tradition of rare and macabre…

So Today I Went Shopping for a Used Submarine

“So apparently Vancouver has something of a submarine graveyard,” says graphic designer/ photographer Emanuel Smedbøl alongside his instagram photos that popped up on my newsfeed and subsequently sent me into a spiral of google searches, from “used research submarines for sale” to “de-militarised Russian sub for cheap“. (I’m easily distracted). Alas, it’s not as easy…

The Secret History of the Conversation Chair

It’s taken many names, shapes and forms over the centuries – the conversation chair, the courting bench, a tête-à-tête, a chaperone chair, the vis-à-vis, gossip chair or the indiscret. Considered the pinnacle of sophistication and style during the Gilded and Victorian age, if you were entertaining the fashionable elite, one simply wasn’t running a home…

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