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Category / People / Icons / Muses

Petition to Teach Kids about the Mad Adventures of Nellie Bly in History Class

When Nellie Bly got bored of writing about fashion and gardening, she went undercover as a patient in a mental asylum and faked insanity to expose the institutional abuse. When she read Jules Verne’s book Around the world in 80 Days, she attempted the fictional journey herself, and did it in 72 days, 6 hours,…

The Grace Mirabella Years: A Vogue Editor’s Unsung Legacy

Hailed as the most powerful woman in media, Anna Wintour has been fictionalised, caricatured and propelled into icon status since becoming editor-in-chief of Vogue. Then there’s Diana Vreeland, editor of the American style bible between 1963–1971, an industry legend who was the driving force of the Met’s Costume Institute, and styled a persona that would be remembered…

Portraits of the Harlem Renaissance

Thanks to Carl Van Vechten, we have glorious colour photographs of all the leading Black intellectuals and artists of the 1930s to the 1960s. A wealthy white patron of Black art, Van Vechten was a controversial figure during his lifetime and remains so today. There is no denying, however, that he helped to bring world…

Stay at the Home of Victorian “Axe Murderess”

“Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one.” The murders of Andrew J. Borden and his wife Abby on the morning of August 4th, 1892, shocked the citizens of Fall River, Massachusetts and caused an international sensation when Mr. Borden’s 32…

Nikola Tesla told him: “Bury your Findings until Humanity is Ready”

Full disclosure, we never gave the Periodic Table much thought – it remains in our memory as a clunky patchwork of confusing titled squares taped to the back of our school chemistry folder that our teachers would occasionally torture us with for a pop quiz on the elements. Walter Russell however, a 1920s Renaissance man,…

At Home and in the Office with America’s First Black Millionairess

There are so many grand Gilded Age homes in New York’s Hudson River Valley, it led one 19th century wit to comment that ‘one couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a millionaire’s mansion’. Walk along the always fascinating Croton Aqueduct Trail and you can catch glimpses of these luxurious mansions that were once homes to…

The Black Aerialist Who Dazzled Gilded Age Paris

A diminutive Black woman hung upside down from a trapeze as two men pushed and shoved a 200 pound cannon to the center of the circus ring. She grasped a chain on the cannon and hung it on a hook held between her teeth. At a signal, she was hoisted aloft. The audience watched with…

Before Amelia Earhart, there was the Forgotten First Lady of Flight

We have all heard of Amelia Earhart, breaking records as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, but where did the inspiration for her aviation adventure come from? Two decades earlier, the lesser known but equally high-flying Harriet Quimby blazed the trail and proved cockpits aren’t just for men. In 1911, she became the…

The Lost Art of the Movie Title

Movie title typography is a lost art in my opinion. Hollywood today just doesn’t put that same pizazz (yeah I’m gonna use that word) in to their opening or ending title sequences anymore. Christian Annyas designs websites in between in his morning coffee and his evening movie and boy, has he watched a lot of…

She Put Bohemianism on New York’s Front Page

No magazine has a cover style as distinctive, enduring and charming as that of The New Yorker. With its unmistakably unique title font and with almost a century’s commitment to using original artwork on its front cover in every weekly edition since 1925, it’s arguably the most influential magazine ever when it comes to culture,…

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