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Category / Fashion for Dummies

She Played the World’s Most Unappreciated Music, but looked Fabulous Doing it

First things first: it’s not like we hate the accordion. We like it on the occasional metro platform, and we love to hear it in a distant summer breeze by the Seine. Few things are as effective at stirring up good ‘ole Parisian nostalgia, even after all these years. It’s just, well, a lot. It…

So This Is Where Johnny Depp Does His Shopping

If any of Johnny Depp’s characters went clothes shopping, whether it be the sea-faring Jack Sparrow, the cravat-wearing Mad Hatter, the 1930s bank-robbing John Dillinger, or Roux and his band of river gypsies from Chocolat, this would probably be the place you’d find them digging through the rails. And seeing as Johnny Depp’s personal style looks…

The Last Eccentrics of the English Estate

Step inside Three of England’s most Unconventional Grand Homes… Time Capsule of a Taxidermy Hoarder They call Calke Abbey the “un-stately” home– rooms filled with animal heads kept in dusty glass cases, fading furnishings, cobwebs and walls of peeling paintwork. In lieu of restoring the house to its former glory, the English National Trust chose to leave…

Stalin’s Fashion House: Style Spying behind the Iron Curtain

For many, “Soviet fashion” reads like an oxymoron. One simply can’t imagine that funding fashion ateliers was high up on Joseph Stalin’s to-do list, and it wasn’t, but still — it was there, and apparently it was utterly extravagant. “Eclectic mannequins were turning slowly as they displayed rather bewildering clothes,” wrote Elsa Schiaparelli of the…

The Day the Shorts got Shorter

After this most deepest and darkest of winters (aren’t they always), what I’m more than ready for the sort of weather that just makes you want to burst out of the house and run the streets in short shorts. This is basically what is happening in these photographs I fished out of the LIFE archives… With LIFE’s…

10 Fashion Labels we bet Frida Kahlo Would have Loved

Where would Friday Kahlo shop if she was alive today? She’s still one of the most revolutionary and influential women in modern culture, so naturally, you might be wondering – where can you get a wardrobe like hers these days? Those colourful folksy prints, artisanal embroidery and quirky accessories are just what summer dreams are…

Keeping up with a Time-Travelling Victorian Couple

I‘ve just come across Sarah and Gabriel Chrisman, a couple of neo-Victorians living in Port Townsend, Washington. I found them on the internet of course, via their own website, which raises the question: just how serious about living as Victorians are they? After trawling through their seemingly endless website and reading a few interviews they’ve done…

The ’80s Harlem Hip Hop Tailor: Dapper Dan

He was selling custom-made clothing to Hip Hop’s finest for thousands of dollars a piece, fashioned from rolls of fake Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Fendi prints out of his Harlem boutique during the 1980s. His name is Dapper Dan and before the likes of Kanye West and Rihanna were doing it, this guy was the…

Old School Bikinis: A Brief Compendium of the Itsy Bitsy

There’s something about vintage bikinis, something about the way they looked tailor-made with soft cotton patterns not made in China, generously cut with so much extra puffy fabric, you could probably have stuffed a sandwich down the front of your pants for lunch at the beach. And now that swimwear season is nearly upon us, I’m finding it…

America’s King of Macabre Would Have Made a Killer Fashion Designer

Who else writes an alphabet book where “E is for Ernest who choked on a peach?” or where “B is for Basil assaulted by bears?” Master of the macabre, Edwardian enthusiast, unlikely style icon, cat lover – there’s no box the late illustrator and author Edward Gorey doesn’t tick for us. He wasn’t trying to…

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