15 49.0138 8.38624 both 0 bullet 0 4000 1 0 horizontal https://www.messynessychic.com 300 4000

Category / People / Icons / Muses

The Long Forgotten Love Story of the Titanic’s Interracial Couple

We Know Jack and Rose but what about Joseph and Juliette? The Titanic was the greatest shipwreck of the 20th century and most of us grew up with the love story of the James Cameron film. He built one of the world’s most iconic affairs with fragments of real stories from the passengers on board,…

Drawing Boards for the Ballets Russes

Nineteenth century Russia was restless, and so was Léon Bakst. The young man belonged to a new generation of creatives, one ready to turn Realism on its head with one flick of a bejewelled, utterly fabulous wrist. Today, his name is “a byword for excitement, for colour and glamour” and a radical new approach to…

Mozart’s Sister, the Forgotten Prodigy

It can be difficult having a sibling who is a high achiever but imagine if that sibling was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the child prodigy, composer, and multi-instrumentalist with an unquantifiable talent that would astound the world with his genius. By the time he died at 35, he had composed over 800 pieces of music and…

Meet America’s Lost Wonder Woman

The personification of countries is nothing new. For years artists have used the personification of countries to make make a point about the country’s political actions, its history, and at times to inspire hope during the most trying of times. From the 1800s and to the early 1900s it was popular for countries to have…

Building Mr. Eiffel’s Penthouse Apartment: A Tower Under Construction

A Parisian friend dropped some very interesting photographs in my inbox this week, some that I’d never seen before of the Eiffel Tower in its earliest days. I had previously come across time-lapse photographs of the Eiffel Tower in its various stages of construction, but none like this; none that went behind the scaffolding, right up close inside the growing skeleton…

Her Apprenticeship with Le Corbusier Didn’t Go Quite as He Expected

“We don’t embroider cushions here,” said the man considered as the most important architect of the modern age, during his first encounter with Charlotte Perriand. She wanted to work for Le Corbusier, a name synonymous with those dramatically new brutal concrete buildings, rejecting the past, promising a utopian future. He would take some convincing to hire Perriand,…

On Dating David Bowie in the Seventies

From a distant galaxy, far, far away, Ziggy Stardust made his last public appearance in 1973 before David Bowie retired the glamrock persona and sent him packing for good. But the infamous last hurrah in London would also his first public collaboration with another equally unique being who would go on to make a profound…

So Matisse, Chagall, and the Headless Horseman Walk into a Church…

Tucked along New York’s Hudson River is the town of Sleepy Hollow, where old carriage roads can still be walked, and the woodlands feel just a bit darker than they should. It’s also home to the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, a gothic style church built in 1921 by the Rockefellers. Oh, and it happens to…

You Can Blow a Kiss to the Real St. Valentine

That’s right, there really was a flesh-and-blood Italian behind the kitsch holiday we’ve got today, and he went by the name of Saint Valentine. Unfortunately for Valentine, however, the day-turned-holiday marked his tragic end, as the martyr was clubbed to death in Rome on February 14th, 269 AD. But you can still go blow a…

Kim Jong-un Married One of His Cheerleaders

It’s a big year for North Korea. The country has qualified 22 athletes for the 2018 Winter Olympics in the DPRK enemy territory of Pyeongchang, South Korea– and the world is holding its breath to see how interactions unfold. Also in tow with the athletes? Kim Jong-un’s “Army of Beauties,” a highly competitive cheerleading squad…

NEWER POSTS 1 … 15 16 17 … 83 OLDER POSTS