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Category / How to start a subculture

And then, Man Created the Stick-On Bra

Ah yes, there’s nothing like a good game of tennis while sporting a pair of pointy cotton hats glued to your bosom. I had the pleasure of digging up an actual fashion feature that Life magazine ran in 1949 on the latest brassiere to hit the market, called the Posĕs (pronounced “pose-ease”). Advertised as both bra and bikini, the “discrete”…

Who was the Kissing Bandit, Baseball’s Forgotten Sex Symbol?

For thirty years, she was the buxom babe of baseball who famously rushed the field at major league baseball games to steal kisses from up to 50 athletes in front of thousands of spectators. The media branded her Morganna, “The Kissing Bandit,” and she quickly became a celebrity in her own right, winning endorsement deals, film, television and magazine…

Inside the FBI’s Colossal Fingerprint Factory

Before the FBI went digital, it looked a little more like a giant stock warehouse for Amazon.com. In the 1920s, the bureau was only employing 25 workers to classify around 800,000 print cards, but by 1943, there were more than 20,000 employees sorting through 70 million fingerprints. At the height of wartime, the archives were so overwhelmed that the FBI eventually…

World War II Stories of a Cult Fashion Jacket

Isn’t she gorgeous? I was taking my morning roam around the internet when I stumbled upon this vintage embroidered silk jacket for sale online at Etsy. Unfortunately, when I clicked the link, I was told, “Sorry, this item has been sold”. Of course it had. But I never give up that easily. And, just as all great and…

The Underground Travelling Tiki Bar

Tiki, unlike disco, is not dead. It may have been sleeping off a hangover in a cabana somewhere since the mid 1970s, but the kitsch phenomenon is alive and well… Pictured above is one of Los Angeles’ most iconic tiki bars of yesteryear, Vagabond’s House, during its heyday on Wilshire Boulevard in the 1950s. In the 1970s,…

Honk if you Love the Subculture of Indian Trucker Art

I‘ve been itching to do something on the marvel that is the subculture of Indian Trucker Art, but I’ve been waiting for just the right reason to do it– and today I found it. Horn Please is a stunning documentary that encapsulates the kaleidoscopic age-old Indian folk art that found its way into the modern-day…

Presenting the Pussycar, the Maddest Cars to ever Hit the Streets of Paris

“In this world where everything is banal and ugly, we must know how to create the beautiful and unusual.” These are the words of Jean Pierre Ponthieu, quite possibly the maddest French inventor of the 20th century. In the 1960s, Ponthieu embarked on a new career in car design and created more than 200 small cars, given the highly unfortunate…

Meet the Flying Cholitas, the Women who Wrestle in their Petticoats

Fashion and wrestling are two things you wouldn’t expect to be put in the ring together, but in Bolivia, they make fierce opponents– or should I say, allies? The elaborate but uniquely sartorial outfits worn by the indigenous women throughout the Andean highlands of Bolivia have captured the eye of many a traveler, myself included. They…

Living like a Castaway on the San Blas Islands

Our boat awaited us on the other side of the jungle. We didn’t know it yet, but the 4am wake-up call, the roller coaster ride through the Guna mountains and a thrashing from the sea on a tiny boat would be all worth it to reach the San Blas Islands… The dock consists of a few sticks and…

Meet the Islington Twins, Double the Dapper

If you happened to have lived in North London at any point between the early 1970s to this day, around the Islington & Highbury tube station specifically, there’s a good chance you might have seen these dapper chaps, Chet and Joe Okonkwo, a.k.a, the “Islington Twins”. Lead image (c) Janette Beckman For almost a decade in the…

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