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Category / People / Icons / Muses

The American Marie Antoinette of Pre-War Paris

Her private villa in Versailles hosted the last great Parisian party before the storm of World War II, attended by Coco Chanel, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the Rothschilds. Paris fashion experts named her the best-dressed woman in the world and her eye for design catapulted her to the higher echelons of Parisian…

Why don’t they bring back Ice-Skating Cocktail Waiters?

Winter is coming, and while I do enjoy having an excuse to quote Game of Thrones at any given moment, you know what would be really fun? Skating cocktail waiters delivering whisky and wine at our beck and call, pirouetting in their coat tails as they skate off to fetch our 3rd round. That, my soon-to-be frost-bitten friends, would be a…

Ridiculously Cool Couples

Easy reading today folks. Call me creepy– actually, don’t call me that please, but I spend a strange amount of time on the internet looking at old photographs of famous people from the 60s and 70s. That era is just so darn cool, I just couldn’t help but find another excuse to blog about it,…

Our Cross-Dressing Ancestors

We seem to assume that if our ancestors knew half of the things our generation was getting up to today, they would be rolling over in their graves. But what if those same elders had plenty of secrets of their own? Greek, Pagan and Hindu mythology all have a long history of cross dressing that can…

Daguerreotypes of Anonymous African Americans

Simply because we don’t see enough of this– material record of black history, that is. I came across the Randolph Linsly Simpson Collection in Yale’s online archives at the Beinecke Library, which includes letters, prints, film clips and formal studio portraits of African Americans. For more than 25 years, Randolph Linsly Simpson, a white man whose…

10 Things You Probably didn’t Know about Hugh Hefner

I never thought I’d say this, but I think Hugh Hefner and I might have shared a lot of common interests– yes the same Hugh Hefner that plastered naked women across its semi-gloss pages and the very one that’s often credited with laying the foundation for mainstream porn culture. When news broke of his death…

The Forgotten Doughnut Heroines of Wartime

The doughnut– America’s favourite indulgence– has an unexpected heroic history. Despite having been invented in the 1800s, the doughnut wasn’t popularised until WWI, when the ring-shaped pastries brought comfort to thousands of soldiers serving in the trenches during the brutal years far from home. The Salvation Army, a well-known Christian charitable foundation, became the first prominent organisation to…

The 1950s All-Girl Hot Rod Gang

When we think of women in the 1950s, we tend to picture some kind of Stepford housewife or a glamorous Marilyn Monroe type. Rarely does a character like bad girl Betty Rizzo come to mind and you’d be hard pressed to find a female Hollywood equivalent of James Dean’s “Rebel without a Cause”. Today, I think I found the real…

The Best Pieces up for Auction from Audrey Hepburn’s Personal Collection

I‘ve always been drawn to the less clean-cut screen legends of the past, but there was no way I wasn’t going to have my eye on the Audrey Hepburn sale of the century. To own her Breakfast at Tiffany’s script, a pair of her ballet flats, or just a card from the studio telling her what time…

The Amazing, the Inexplicable, Orange Show in Texas

Roadside America is filled with unique oddities from giant balls of twine to extravagant kitschy Mexican rest-stops. Each of these unique places were a labor of love, making something impossible somehow possible. One of the most eccentric of these Americana road-stops is simply a living shrine to the orange. The Orange Show in Houston, Texas, is a fantastical collection of…

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