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Category / People / Icons / Muses

Mona (Marilyn) Monroe, the $10-an-Hour Pin-Up Model

In 1946, a nineteen year-old aspiring actress in Hollywood was in need of a job, and fast. Born Norma Jean Dougherty, destined to become Marilyn Monroe, but in between, for those not-so-squeaky-clean modelling jobs, she preferred to go by Mona– with a going rate of $10 an hour. It’s often thought that the first nude modelling Monroe did was…

The First Monokini: Trying to make the Topless Swimsuit happen in 1964

When we think of the monokini today, we picture those fiddly one-piece swimsuits that give you awkward tan lines, popularised by the Kardashian and Hilton sisters. But the first monokini was in fact originally a topless swimsuit that exposed the female breasts, conceived in 1964 by avant-garde designer Rudi Gernreich, who predicted (rather accurately) that…

The Reclusive Peeping Tom Photographer and his Cardboard Camera

Charming eccentric or tolerated local boogyman? The townspeople of Kyjov in Czech Republic could never quite decide. Miroslav Tichý took nearly a hundred photographs a day with his homemade camera, wandering around the streets of his hometown, often spotted at bus stops, the main square, the park and the swimming pool, although he was frequently arrested…

Cinema’s First Sex Symbol was also America’s First Goth

From Mae West to Eva Green, the cinema archetype of the ‘femme fatale’ has fascinated and frightened audiences since Hollywood’s golden age. But nearly a century before Sharon Stone bore all as the deadly seductress Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct, silent-film actress Theda Bara, the silver screen’s very first sex symbol, hypnotized filmgoers with her…

Electro Queens and Digital Divas who Pioneered Electronic Music

There isn’t one clear inventor of electronic music, although if you start looking, you’ll find that an overwhelming number of early pioneers who shaped its history were women. On both a technical and creative level, women have and continue to revolutionalize electronic music. As the genre developed throughout the 20th century, a hidden wave of…

How They Painted Bond’s Golden Girl

Step One: Actress Shirley Eaton is cast as a gold-painted corpse in Goldfinger. Step Two: Miss Eaton is assured that death from “skin suffocation”, (although probably not entirely certain about it in 1964), is not a likely outcome. Step Three: Just in case, a doctor is hired to be on set at all times in fear of possible skin…

Sophia vs Jayne: The OTHER Photos Behind That Sideways Glare

I had always thought Sophia’s disapproving look in this iconic photograph taken by Delmar Watson was a perfectly captured moment of female jealousy. Mansfield to me was the carefree blonde and Loren, the feisty brunette. But of course, most of us have only seen this moment from one angle. There were other photographs taken that night…

The 1970s Political Activist Who Invented Penis Pants

Introducing Eldridge Clever, Presidential candidate, writer, political activist, a prominent early leader of the Black Panthers, oh and inventor of the penis pants. The fashion statement the world never asked for, solved all sorts of problems according to their late inventor, Eldridge Cleaver, such as ‘fig-leaf mentality’… “Clothing is an extension of the fig leaf –…

The Last Japanese Mermaids

For nearly two thousand years, Japanese women living in coastal fishing villages made a remarkable livelihood hunting the ocean for oysters and abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls. They are known as Ama, and if you’ve dipped into Messy Nessy’s archives, you will have already met the few ladies still left in Japan that…

The Dapper Daredevil Who Documented America’s Skyline in the Making

Where do I start with this photograph? The dapper shoes? The Gene Kelly stance? The delicate ease with which he’s holding that enormous camera? Or the fact that all of this is happening at some unthinkable height above the streets of New York? This handsome fellow is American photographer, Charles C. Ebbets, the very same Charles C. Ebbets who captured one…

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