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Category / Time travel

Eau de Seine, a Conversation-starting Souvenir from Paris

“The Seine is a great place to have a crisis, since it clearly embodies the strength and the uncertainty, the beauty and the challenge of Paris itself.” – James Baldwin The Seine river flows through the heart of the northern region of France, including Paris, bringing life, business, and recreation to the city alongside an…

Let’s Reminisce Over Airplanes That Had Piano Bars, Cocktail Lounges, Pubs, and Restaurants

Airlines today just aren’t up for a good party anymore. Look at those fancy folks hanging out in comfy swivel chairs, ordering Martinis and asking attractive strangers, “So, do you come here often?” Don’t they look like they’re about to have the best flight of their lives? The 1970s was without doubt, a golden age of…

How to Host the Olympic Games on a Shoestring Budget

As the countdown for the Paris Summer Olympics has begun and the excitement for the international extravaganza of athletic prowess mounts, few will now remember a past games that had a rather more frugal approach to the sporting proceedings. Compared to the multi-millions spent on the current games the 1948 London Olympics was the make-do-and-mend…

What Happened to Picasso’s Mysterious Teenage Muse?

For a few Spring months in 1954, a melancholy Picasso found himself enraptured by 19-year-old Sylvette David. Of all the muses who bookmarked his life — and there were many — she’s fallen to the wayside of history as one of the most enigmatic and misunderstood. For years, critics wrote the body of work she…

Victorian People-Watching at the Beach

Today, our time machine is going for a pit-stop on a sunny, Victorian Era beach in Atlantic City, where the ponies are aplenty, and the bathing costumes make the women look like layer cakes. Sure, contemporary eyes may see a bunch of prudes, but for folks in the 1800s, showing off your bloomers at the…

Proud WWII Pilots Modelling their Personalised Flight Jackets

They all had them; the standard A-2 flight jacket that every soldier was issued during the war, but I could never really imagine these tough, battle-worn guys sitting around, designing and doodling their own customised bombers. While some were clearly made professionally and some were homemade while killing time in between the action, here’s a fantastic collection of photographs from…

Memories of a Lost Valley: 5,000 Photographs Discovered in an Attic

Between 1900 and 1930, a poor and destitute seed pedlar took more than five thousand photographs of daily life in an isolated valley of the Italian-speaking Swiss territory to the south of the Alps. Roberto Donetta can now be considered one of Swiss photography’s great outsider artists, but when he died in debt, solitude and misery in 1932,…

Now That Is How You Write a Love Letter

They met in Paris in 1932. Both already married, American novelist Henry Miller and Franco-American diarist Anaïs Nin began an intense love affair leading to some of the most passionate letters ever written… August 14, 1932 Anaïs: Don’t expect me to be sane anymore. Don’t let’s be sensible. It was a marriage at Louveciennes—you can’t dispute…

20 People Not Giving a Damn About the Red Carpet at Cannes

My favourite kind of people are one the ones who don’t give a damn. So while the rest of the media fusses over the red carpet posers at the Cannes film festival, getting their seasonal fix of celebrity circusry, let’s take a look back at the ones who were just in it for the booze, the beach, and the…

Our Zoom Date with Wes Anderson’s Sign Painters

It feels like a lifetime ago that were spying on the film set for The French Dispatch, desperate for a glimpse of the movie magic that Wes and his team of talented elves were busy creating in the French town of Angoulême. Alas, the much-anticipated film finally made it to cinemas and we scored ourselves…

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