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Category / Inspiration Vault

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…

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…

Now That Is How You Write a Love Letter

They met in Paris in 1932. Both already married, American novelist Henry Miller and Franco-American diarist Anaïs Nin began an intense love affair leading to some of the most passionate letters ever written… August 14, 1932 Anaïs: Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute…

Artist of the Week: She was a Victorian Rockstar Photographer

Julia Margaret Cameron revolutionized the world of photography. Known for her dreamy, soft-focus images and dramatic compositions, Cameron was the queen of Victorian portraiture. She was ahead of her time, doing everything differently before it was cool. Cameron was a late bloomer artistically, she didn’t pick up a camera until she was 48. Her daughter…

20 People Not Giving a Damn About the Red Carpet at Cannes

My favourite kind of people are one the ones who don’t give a damn. So while the rest of the media fusses over the red carpet posers at the Cannes film festival, getting their seasonal fix of celebrity circusry, let’s take a look back at the ones who were just in it for the booze, the beach, and the…

How Did We Forget the First Movie Star?

Picture this: it’s the early 1900s, the silent film era is still just finding its feet, and movie stars are as mythical as unicorns. Enter Florence Lawrence, the “first movie star”, who is about to embark on an epic career, spending the next three decades appearing in almost 300 films. Up until this point, no…

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…

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