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Category / Inspiration Vault

When Montmartre was Harlem-on-the-Seine

After the Great War, a new kind of music began to waft through the winding streets of lower Montmartre. Unrestrained, audacious, with a potent syncopated rhythm unlike anything ever heard in Europe. It was the music of Black Americans who had started to move into the neighborhood. For a brief time, far away from Jim…

The Geisha who Brought Kabuki to the West

At the height of japonisme, Sada Yacco appeared like a comet, touring America and Europe with the first kabuki theatre company ever seen in the West. She was the undisputed star of the 1900 Paris Exposition, drawing bigger crowds and garnering more rhapsodic praise than the divine Sarah Bernhardt herself. A trailblazer who defied tradition…

The Nautch Girls: India’s Forgotten Dancers

You arrive at the gardens after nightfall with the full moon casting a cool, pale glow over the muggy evening. Two dozen torch bearers stand by to light your way, and as you approach the crowd, you sense the anxious anticipation of the delights to come. Soon the musicians strike up their instruments, and a…

Don’t Forget the Fearless Father of Unisex Clothing

From Harry Styles to Diane Keaton, household names of every generation continue to embrace and explore fashion that goes beyond the traditional gender binary. And as brands take note of an increasingly mainstream social shift, from luxury to fast fashion, the 2020s are on well course to being remembered as the decade that unisex fashion…

She Built a Candle Empire from her Ancestral Village in Mexico

The importance of ritual candles is celebrated in many cultures across the world. Their beauty is hidden in the hope and magic that persists until the last ray of beeswax-powered light, and the tradition preserves valuable ancestral storytelling and history. Zapotec candle making, in all its kaleidoscopic and ornamental mastery, is upheld by a single…

A Brief Compendium of Crazy Kitsch Lighting

The Southern Belle. The Moon Beam. The Serenade. We’re not spitting romance novel titles, honey – we’re talking lamps. Kitschy, retro lamps. Lamps with names worthy of their painstakingly groovy macramé. Novelty TV lights in the shape of an elephant. Lamps made of yesteryear’s synthetics (ex. lucite, fiber glass, popcorn acrylic) and design gimmicks that…

Seven Visionary Spaces Du Jour

The art and science of the enclosure of space is all around us, shelter-creation being traditionally its key function but oftentimes architecture is also a mouthpiece for broadcasting a message through carefully crafted iconography. So-called ‘alternative’ structures vary from intellectual triumphs of the unconventional to purely attention-seeking visual bubble gum. It’s often somewhere in the…

Before Cher Horowitz had her Computer Closet, Marie Antoinette had the Wardrobe Book

Ask any millennial with a heartbeat for fashion about the 90s cult-classic film, Clueless, and watch their eyes light up as they recall Cher Horowitz (played by Alicia Silverstone) and her “way normal” morning routine of mixing and matching pieces on her desktop computer to pick out an outfit for school from her revolving dream…

Inside the Beat Hotel of Paris

“I lay there on the floor, he makes love to Nanette all night, as she whimpers,” wrote Jack Kerouac, recalling the night he slept in Room 41 of a Parisian “fleabag” in the Latin Quarter that his friend and fellow poet had christened “The Beat Hotel”. Gregory Corso, the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers,…

Seven Surprising Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Josephine Baker

Despite being a daughter of St. Louis, MO, for many years Josephine Baker was a virtually unknown name to the average American. These days, as we have come to learn more about Black history and its figures, Ms. Baker has come to be regarded as one of the most dynamic and influential people in history,…

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