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Category / Nostalgia

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 Parisian Ghost Mall Next to the Louvre

Across the street from the most-visited museum in the world where 30,000 tourists pass through everyday, there’s a 10,000m2 shopping mall dedicated to antiques, where you won’t find a soul. Le Louvre des Antiquaires, as it was inaugurated in 1978, was once a thriving retail centre for 250 luxury boutiques specialising in fine arts, jewellery,…

Love, Espionage and Alien Vibrations: Tales of a Soviet Music Machine

What do Lady Gaga and Lenin have in common? They’ve both played the theremin– the world’s first mass-produced electrical instrument, invented by the same guy who created a covert Soviet listening device that sat undetected for 7 years inside the American Embassy in Moscow (planted by Russian school children, no less). The extraordinary story of…

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…

The Other English Royals

I‘m feeling terribly British these days. Of course, I’m not, and I now live across the channel in French enemy territory, but I did grow up there and always felt a sense of loyalty and affection towards the great kingdom that raised me. With a new royal wedding around the corner, I’m feeling all sorts…

Saving Sobański Palace

We thought we knew how the story would end. After all, we’ve seen our fair share of crumbling castles here at Messy Nessy Chic – chateaux holding on for dear life in the final hours of their swan song, left to the whims of nature and urbex explorers. Restoring them is a near anachronistic quest,…

What a Relief Our Doctors Aren’t Bodysnatchers Anymore

This was just too interesting to save for Halloween. It all started when I stumbled upon a photograph of a something called a “mortsafe“– mort being the French word for death and safe implying there was something in need of protection from theft. Indeed, these graveyard oddities were once intended to deter body snatchers from stealing the…

How the World’s First Floating Hotel ended up as a Doomed Wreck in North Korea

We’ll file this one under “Things that ended up in North Korea”. When it first opened in 1988 on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, it promised “paradise at sea”; a floating seven-storey mega structure with nearly 200 rooms, nightclubs, bars, restaurants, a helipad, a tennis court and a 50-seat underwater observatory. Within a decade, it would be…

The Not-So-Lost World of the Parisian Salon

Once upon a time, in a pre-smartphone world, people had to make their own entertainment. And so enters the salon, an Italian-influenced tradition of gathering of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, philosophers and intelligencia that flourished during a period known as the ‘age of conversation’. Dating back to the 17th century, guests would assemble in the…

Before Photoshop, There Was the Disturbing Art of Spirit Photography

Ever since technology has allowed people to capture pictures, photographers have been using photo-editing techniques to trick people. One of the most fascinating early examples is spirit photography. William Hope (c) National Media Museum Spirit photography was a trend in which a photographer edited pictures to make ghosts or spirit-like figures appear alongside the human…

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