Don’t Mess With the Jiu-jitsu Suffragettes

It’s Edwardian Era Glasgow, circa 1914, and the stress mounting in St. Andrews’s Hall is unbearable. Flocks of Suffragettes and policemen are waiting for the woman of the hour, Emmeline Pankhurst, to magically surface and fight against her own arrest — the tension is so palpable, you could cut it with a knife. Or karate-chop…

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

1. Forgotten Bollywood Film Sets “When I went back to Kolkata in 2013 a few years after photographing the cinema halls there, it was evident to trace the footsteps of film backwards from the cinema hall to film studio. The old filmmaking gear was stored in corners of the shooting floors and in dark rooms…

The Towns That Were Moved by Horses

They say “it takes a village,” but if it was 1920-something, it took a horse– maybe a couple. As absurd as it seems today, if necessary, entire towns were known to relocate all their buildings via horse-and-buggy to proverbially greener pastures. With the rapid railway and urban development boom at the turn-of-the-century, lots of folks…

One Last Shopping Spree at a New York Icon of Fashion

For 123 years, Camelot was on 5th Avenue, otherwise known as the Henri Bendel department store, the place to be for any fashionable woman worth her salt in 20th century America. So when the timeless Manhattan mainstay announced its imminent, forever closure this month, we kind of lost it. Needed a hat that looked like a…

This 1950s French Lingerie Show will Make You Blush

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDs5xYsk3Qk&has_verified=1 We fell into yet another rabbit hole today when we stumbled upon a scene from the 1954 film, Ah! Les Belles Bacchantes. It was marketed as the very first French burlesque film starring “the 100 most beautiful French women,” and one of the greatest French slapstick comedians of all time. Above all it oozed sex appeal,…

The Secret Lives of Fashion Mannequins

For a brief moment in the 1930s, one of the most famous celebrities of the day was a 100-pound mannequin named Cynthia. She had box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, received freebies from Tiffany and Cartier, graced the cover of Life magazine and was even invited to the wedding of Edward V111 and Wallis Simpson.…

Dinner at the Drive-Through Eiffel Tower

We’ve seen it dressed up every which way; painted yellow, used as a giant advertising billboard; and we even peered inside its hidden apartment, but we’ve never seen the Eiffel Tower looking quite like this. Ladies and gents, you’re looking at the 1936 Eiffel Tower that never was, a mock-up to turn Paris’ Iron Lady into……

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

1. The ghostly remains of a failed techno-utopia “Restricted Areas” is a stunning photography series by Russian visual artist Danila Tkachenko, who traveled to secret cities in the former Soviet Union to capture everything from an abandoned diesel submarine (the world’s largest) and a concrete sarcophagus that seals a mysterious 2.5-mile-deep hole–at the time, one of the…

Meet the Godfather of Voguing

Willi Ninja did far more than “strike a pose”. Before Madonna was Voguing for the masses on MTV in 1990, the niche dance form was being created by black and latino drag queens during the ballroom era of 1960’s Harlem, New York. It was Willi Ninja, an ambitious young dancer, who pioneered Voguing, and used it to…

The Inexplicably Fascinating Japanese Art of Being Useless

“Not always useful, but not altogether useless” is the mantra behind Chindōgu, a Japanese art form that calls for stilettos with built-in umbrellas, noodle bibs for the face, and glue sticks filled with butter (that one we get). They’re nonsensical inventions on a mission, missing the mark of utility by a hair, and on purpose. “I…