It was still pretty much an opportunity to objectify women back then but hey, we all still end up watching it every year (if there’s nothing else on television of course). One noticeable differences is that these ladies look far more like real princesses than the modern-day contestants… Images by George Silk from the LIFE…
“Seeing these massive mechanisms being tossed into the ocean like a toy in the bathtub is a ping in my heart.” Award-winning photographer Stephen Mallon captured these incredible pictures over three years as he documented the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s recycling program retire the remains of obsolete New York subway cars into the Atlantic ocean. Over…
I‘m having a very ‘Americana nostalgia’ day here at MessyNessyChic HQ for some reason (see previous post on all things stuck in the 1950s), which segue-ways into today’s second time travelling discovery. I first spotted this retired mid-century diner in the archives of the instagram account American Squares. “A junk store built around an old…
Some underground histories are famous, but some have remained just that, underground. Even if you live on the West Coast, you might not have heard the urban legend of Portland’s infamous Shanghai Tunnels. Portland, a port city in Oregon near the Columbia River, has a gridlock of interconnected basements and passageways under many of it’s…
The cultural shift between pre and post-WWII world Japan was complicated and often divisive, but if you were photographer Eikoh Hosoe, that tension became fuel for creative expression that turned into a surrealist dreamworld – or nightmare, depending on who you asked. The Japanese artist’s works mirrored the state of a shell-shocked country in the…
We’ve made a few trips to explore the abandoned resorts of the Borscht Belt of New York. Once places like Grossinger’s, the Concord, Kutscher’s and the Pines, were the epitome of a swanky summer holiday for New Yorkers. All through the Catskills were dozens of all-inclusive resorts, glitzy enough to entice the mostly Jewish, upper-middle…
In a stifling gymnasium in Anywhere, America dozens of couples shuffle around the cramped space clinging on to each other for dear life. Spectators in stands cheer on their favourite couples, watching their aching legs barely hold up their exhausted bodies. Some have mastered the art of sleeping on their partners shoulders; as long as…
If you ever find yourself in Oxford, England in search of a bed for the night, you might consider booking a room at the student dorm accommodation of Christ Church College, University of Oxford for a real-life Harry Potter experience. The university not only provides accommodation over the summer months, but your stay comes with an all…
If you build it, they will come. And if they don’t, you’re screwed. Such was the case for Mr. D.W. Griffith, the infamous movie mogul behind the best worst movie ever made: the silent epic Intolerance (1916). Griffith became the emperor Los Angeles for the picture, creating a veritable city of 300-ft-tall Judean walls and…