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Category / Lost & Found

Get in the Mood for Lurve with the Best Cookbook to Come out of the 80s

There were some things that were just accepted in the 80s and Barbara Cartland’s cookbook was one of them. Published in 1984, The Romance of Food features over 170 pages of kitschy technicolour plates that were all photographed at Cartland’s own Hertfordshire estate (the former home of Beatrix Potter), using her own antique porcelain and knick-knacks alongside the food.…

The Man who Documented the First Americans

His lifework documenting the North American native was once hailed as “the most ambitious enterprise in publishing since the production of the King James Bible.” Today I found his photographs deep in the Flickr’s archives. At the height of Edward Curtis’s career, he had one of the most powerful bankers of his era, J.P. Morgan, personally financing him.…

Ode to the Ladies Pant Suit of Zanzibar

When fashion has been borrowed from the past over and over again, it’s rare to find something that you haven’t seen before. I was browsing through snippets of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, and noticed that among the historic photographs captured throughout East Africa from the 1890s-1920s, there was one…

Greetings from Pioneer Camp, Soviet Russia

Did you hear the one about the Soviet school children who gifted a US Ambassador with a plaque of the United States seal as a gesture of friendship in 1945? It hung in his Moscow office for 7 years before the Americans discovered it was bugged with a listening device. True story. The school children involved in…

Unearthing a Seriously Awkward Interview with Nick Cave

In 1989, Nick Cave, arguably one of the greatest living lyricists, was passing through Paris with his band, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. The baritone singer-songwriter sat down with a French journalist for over 40 excruciatingly awkward minutes. You have Nick Cave in front of you and you start by asking four questions about…

Revisiting a Censored ‘Film Noir’ that Tackled PTSD Decades before it was Acknowledged

For so many US veterans, the real journey home begins in the head – that long, winding road to psychological stability after the traumas of service. Even today, it’s a topic not easily broached given the stigmas surrounding mental health. It wasn’t until 1980, and under much controversy, that the American Psychiatric Association added the term…

10 Remarkable Things Hiding in the Attic

An attic is the ultimate guardian of secrets; a hiding place for all sorts of things disguised in the darkness and the dust– family history, forgotten treasure, architectural follies and perhaps a few skeletons in the closet? I thought it was about time we dedicated a brief compendium to the attic: the most mysterious and…

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…

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…

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Get in the Mood for Lurve with the Best Cookbook to Come out of the 80s

Inside the Paris Department Store where Nazis Shopped for Stolen Jewish Belongings