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Category / People / Icons / Muses

From the Brothel to Beaux-Arts: She Should Have been China’s Own Matisse

Some people paint by numbers. Formality. Then there are those who paint with something else entirely. A kind of electric, lived experience. A place of intimacy with their subject matter that makes a portrait sing, and a still life tremble. Pan Yuliang was one of those people, albeit one who might’ve been left out of…

Meet the Coolest Mayor in the World

Meet Jon Gnarr, mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland’s largest (and coolest) city. Photo by Aleksander Radulovic He never went to university, used to be a taxi driver and played in a local punk rock band called ‘Runny Nose’. After that, Jon became well-known in his country as a comedian and actor. (That’s him on the right).…

The Lost Style Subculture of Elvis Presley Rebels

What are the Swiss known for? Beautiful skiing and great chocolate? Handy pocket knives and offshore accounts? Founding the Red Cross and being the only country in the heart of Europe to resist fascism? All good points. But did you know that Switzerland was also the birthplace of an extreme rebel youth subculture, based on an…

Misadventures of the Psychedelic Rock Queen Who Tried to Spike Nixon’s Drink

Grace Slick is the the psychedelic queen who didn’t give a f**k– literally, she was the first to say the word on American television when she sang it in a song with her rock band, Jefferson Airplane. She was Janis Joplin’s drinking buddy, a talented songwriter with a wicked sense of humour, and the woman who plotted…

Where are the Black Archeologists?

“Why are there so few Black American archeologists?” asked Maria Franklin in response to a landmark 1997 survey which found that only 2 out of 1500 Archeological respondents identified as Black. Years later, the status of her question posed in a paper published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015 – and its answer –…

The Strange Anatomy of ABBA’s Infamous (Tax Deductible) Wardrobe

What do house cats, Euro pop, and the ingenious tax savvy have in common? Owe Sandström, that’s who. As the flamenco-dancing-zoologist-designer behind the costumes of ABBA, Sandström certainly played his part in helping the Swedish supergroup reach fame in the 1970s – where they have remained ever since. In fact, a deeper dive into the…

Nazi Summer Camp, Long Island, USA

Camp Siegfried was forcibly shut down by the US government when Germany declared war on the United States. It had been protected by the 1st Amendment until that time, when it became illegal for US citizens to swear allegiance to Germany. Founded in 1935, it was operated by the German American Bund, an American Nazi…

Beauties and their Bombers: Meet the “Top Gun” Heroines of WW2

The term war hero doesn’t usually bring to mind images of it-girls or front page glamour shots… But the ladies of the female section of the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) singlehandedly transformed the idea of what it meant to be a war hero. They were the glamour girls of the Second World War, but they were…

The Day the Black Supermodels Stormed Versailles

There’s a “Battle of Versailles” they don’t teach you about in history class; the event that transformed the world’s most iconic château into a star-studded battle royale between French and American fashion designers in the fall of 1973. The guest list was legendary, with Josephine Baker, Princess Grace, Andy Warhol in the audience to name…

Into the Woods with Green Thumbed Activist, Indy Srinath

Almost a decade ago, Indy Srinath made herself a pretty ambitious promise. “It was like having a sudden awakening,” she tells Messy Nessy Chic about her decision to learn the name of every single plant she discovered, “where you feel like you’ve been living with a crowd of people who serve you your entire life,…

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