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Category / People / Icons / Muses

Vintage Muse du Jour: Peggy Guggenheim, Patron Saint of Art & Sex

You probably know Guggenheim– the name, the museums, the collections– but do you know the woman behind legendary the name (and sunglasses)? Peggy Guggenheim didn’t live the domesticated life that was expected of an heiress. She was her own kind of bohemian, impossible to define, mysterious and in many ways, tragic in her loneliness. But…

We’ll Call her Story a Real-Life “Handmaid’s Tale”

She escaped the Gestapo twice – a glamorous socialite, fashion columnist, pianist and mother of two before the war, she went on to become the only woman to head an underground resistance network against the Nazi Occupation in France. She recruited 3,000 members, 24% of which were women, making it the resistant organisation with the…

A Time Travelling Greenwich Village Studio Hides an Incredible Art Collection

Wait for no muse. Make a habit of working all the time. Let your wooden sculptures grow up, and your bronze sculptures grow out. Such was the world according to Chaim Gross, the patron saint of bohemian Greenwich Village. As an Arts educator, he was bar none in passion and gave playfully acerbic advice (this…

The Secret Career of David Bowie’s Back-Up Singer

Nobody could do camp quite like Klaus Nomi. He left the downtown New York club scene speechless with soaring operatic vocals, dressed in his signature triangular vinyl tuxedo complete with smoke bombs, punk rock nuances and 1950s sci-fi sound effects. On any given night, you could have found a young Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring…

The Other English Royals

I‘m feeling terribly British these days. Of course, I’m not, and I now live across the channel in French enemy territory, but I did grow up there and always felt a sense of loyalty and affection towards the great kingdom that raised me. With a new royal wedding around the corner, I’m feeling all sorts…

Did Elvis have a Secret Fetish for Vampires?

In our usual perusal of the internet’s nethers, we kept finding trails that pointed to a darker side of the “King of Rock & Roll”, notably, to a dame of darkness named Maila Nurmi, who pioneered the campy-vampire-starlet schtick in the 1950s, paving the way for the likes of Elvira. Who, speak of the Devil,…

She Was India’s ‘Frida Kahlo’

The bold red lip. The dark, enigmatic brows. Leaning up against the wall with her hair braided tight, the young woman looked every bit like Frida Kahlo, posing for a shot with her photographer-lover. She was also an artist – albeit, comparatively unsung – in her own right. Meet Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s answer to Frida’s…

She’s the 1970s Platinum-Selling Transgender Artist We’d Never Heard Of

It’s 1989 and Wendy Carlos is giving in an interview to the BBC surrounded by her electronic synthesizers and her Siamese cats. The Grammy-award winning composer and pioneer of electronic music is entirely in her element, giving a demonstration of the first commercially available keyboard instrument that she helped develop with Robert Moog. No one…

Sneak a Peek at the Facebook of 400 Years Ago

Social media may be the poster child of the 21st century, but the ideas behind LinkedIn and Facebook go back a long, long way. Dutch PhD scholar Sophie Reinders is currently exploring how personal books from many centuries ago known as alba amicorum – Latin for “friend books” – functioned as a sort of pre-dated version of our modern social…

Honeymooning Around the Earth in an Amphibious Jeep

My heroes are up there with the Amelia Earharts, Aloha Wonderwells, Ernest Hemingways, and the Jacques Cousteaus of this world; names that conjure up the romance of adventure and inspire us to take risks in an age where travel has been made too easy. But in all my travel reading, I’d never heard of the…

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