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Category / People / Icons / Muses

Florence Nightingale’s Rival was a Fearless Transgender Man the World Forgot

The secret life of Dr. James Miranda Barry would make one hell of a movie. This remarkable character would spend decades working as a pioneering military surgeon for the British Army, travelling the world, reforming entire healthcare systems and fighting the corner of society’s undesirables. In Africa, Barry performed one of the first successful C-sections…

In 1920s Berlin She Was the Pioneer of Punk

Thought punk was an invention of the 70s? Think again. A diminutive ravenette bombshell with animated eye-brows, brash blue eyeshadow, chalk-white skin and red lips was eons ahead of the curve and had laid the foundations of the punk movement w-a-y back in the 1920s already. Dance performance artist, cabaret queen, pantomimist, big & small…

Georgia O’Keeffe: She Lived Deliciously Alone in the Wild, Wild West

In 1934, Georgia O’Keeffe gutted the passenger seats from her A-Model Ford. It was time to make way for the only companion she needed, and wanted, out west: her art. There, in the dry heat of New Mexico, the pioneering female artist drove, hiked, and schlepped her canvases to the farthest corners of its blackened…

The Many Faces of a Forgotten Gender-Neutral Hero

Who was Claude Cahun? As ambiguous as an empty page, a radical and an indefinable surrealist who traversed social construct; artist, performer, photographer, sculptor, writer, WWII resistance fighter, female, male, other; Claude Cahun was all of these things, or none of these things. As a largely unknown early pioneer of queer culture, Claude found later…

A Brief Compendium of the First Girl Groups, Forgotten in Music History

Before the Spice Girs, before Destiny’s Child and TLC, even before the Supremes, there was a litany of female singing groups – often found in threes, often known for their harmonic prowess, and often found on the great vaudeville stages of the time. They laid the foundation for the girl group as we know it…

Musidora: A Forgotten French Icon Returns

It could well be the heavily kohled black eyes staring straight at you from under that black balaclava and the slinky catsuit that jog the memory. Mind you, we’re talking well over a century ago here, and eons before the Kardashians or Catwoman began flexing their feline curves in skin-tight lycra all-in-ones. Musidora, aka Jeanne…

This Forgotten 1980s Style Movement Explains A Lot About Fashion Today

When we think of the fashion industry’s most influential movers & shakers and icon-makers of the last 50 years, familiar names like Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Grace Coddington or Patricia Field (Sex & the City) come to mind. But there’s another name that got left down the back of fashion history’s sofa – Buffalo –…

The Mythical Indigenous Australians Guarding their Rainforest

Through the ferns of an enchanted forest with tall gums and the call of wild birds all around, stoney eyes are watching in the land down under. At one with nature, fused with the rocks and the tree trunks, mysterious sculptures of a native people are all around, forever guarding and protecting their native paradise. We’re in…

Dressing the Woman in Gold: The Unknown Bohemian Designer behind the Paintings

You know a Gustav Klimt painting when you see one. His gold leaf Japanese-influenced portraits of women, one of the most famous of which was the subject of a major Hollywood film (Woman in Gold), dressed in vibrant, multi-colored and almost psychedelic prints, saw him become one of the most prominent painters of his era.…

Indulge in the Underrated Influence of Erté

An artist like Erté was unlikely to go by unnoticed in history with his profound obsession for the arts, spanning from dance to theatre and film to high fashion and beyond. The visual wizard arguably coined the Art Deco aesthetic with a signature style that continues to inspire modern design today and yet, his name…

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