The Accidentally Couture Life of a Samurai

How do you dress for a dance with death? If you were a 14th century Samurai, the pressure was on to go into battle with a kabuto (helmet) that subscribed to a fiercely maximalist vision. These incredible creations varied in form and detail depending on the owner and era, but they were always big, bedazzled, and…

Night of the Living Painting

It was a flourishing trade in human flesh. A quest headed by art suppliers so ruthless in seeking out the perfect pigment, that it makes Dorian Grey’s creep-level look like amateur hour. It was the business of making “Mummy Brown,” a paint colour that quite literally required the ground up remains of mummies to achieve…

House of a 1920s Lady Gaga

“Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.“. ― Dame Edith Sitwell of Renishaw Hall Renishaw Hall may look like a very traditional English estate, but for the last four centuries it has been the ancestral…

Muse du Jour: Lady Miss Kier

Armed with a pair of hot pants and a Cheshire Cat grin, Miss Lady Kier became the lighting rod of ’80s and ’90s electro-pop. As the front woman for Deee-Lite, her intensity turned songs like “Groove Is in the Heart” into pure eardrum candy in the midst of a time when grunge was on the…

Were Romans the First Goths?

The good people of the Roman Empire tend to be remembered as gladiators and prodigious builders of roads, temples and aqueducts who loved to drink lots of wine and end up in bed with their siblings. It’s far less common that we think of Romans as a morbid civilisation, obsessed with their own death culture.…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CCCLVI)

1. Extreme tree pruning in the late 1800s Found on Imgur. 2. The newly opened bookshop in the Chinese city of Chongqing The chongqing zhongshuge bookstore by shanghai-based firm X+living is located on the 3rd and 4th floor of zodi plaza. Found on Design Boom. 3. Square Ocean Waves The phrase “cross seas” refers to waves coming from two…

Van Gogh’s Gun & other Unusual Things up for Auction this Summer

In 1960, a French farmer dug up a Belgian-manufactured Lefaucheux pinfire revolver in a field north of Paris next to the village where Vincent Van Gogh spent his final days. The severely corroded gun is believed to be the one that killed the artist in July of 1890, after he shot himself in the stomach…

It’s Time You Knew about this Middle Eastern Gang of Artists

Google “famous street artists” and you won’t find these guys on the list, but Broken Fingaz ought to be on pop culture’s radar. Our first introduction to them was this mural covering the side of a building in downtown Haifa, their hometown in northern Israel. It depicts an imaginary railway inspired by a forgotten train…

Tehran’s Desert Ghost Towers look like a Zombie Movie Waiting to Happen

They look as if they’ve risen out of the desert itself in some strange, dystopian world. There are no trees, no cars, no bus stops, no parks, no playgrounds, no people. Just the towers. In a barren landscape 50km outside of Iran’s capital city, the Mehra Mer project in Pardis has been “under construction” for many years…

Who Was the Man That Almost Stole Frida’s Heart through his Lens?

Muses. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. That is, not without a fair degree of drama, and especially if you happened to fall into a romantic tornado with miss Frida Kahlo. For a lover to pull Frida out of orbit from Diego – the heartbeat of her world – he or she had…