Working in the Paris Fashion Industry 100 Years Ago

The industry’s most prestigious fashion houses are currently celebrating haute couture week, but for the fashion world a century ago, every week was haute couture week. During the Belle Epoque, there was no such thing as an off-the-rack dress and clothes shopping was a luxury reserved for the wealthy elite. Fashion was made by hand from start…

Brooklyn’s Revolutionary Social Club

On a quiet street in Brooklyn, lies a very peculiar treasure chest. It safeguards the boots of Mexican revolutionaries, and the sound bites of rebels; it collects buttons, posters, and anything upon which one could scrawl a grassroots manifesto. It’s New York City’s “Interference Archive,” and it’s the volunteer-based library, gallery, and archive for tools…

Backstage at the Underwear Show, 1940s

So we’re fresh off Valentine’s Day, and I’m feeling a little bombarded by the underwear industry at present, trying to convince me that I need a five-piece lingerie set for this one night of the year, garter belt and all. Can’t I just be left in peace to pick up my 3-for-2 cotton briefs from…

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Having a Grand Old Time at a Real-Life 1920s “Westworld”

Are you watching HBO’s new American sci-fi western thriller, Westworld? (Or at least trying to follow the twisted plot?). Based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name, Westworld isn’t your typical historical theme park. Intended for rich vacationers who pay to live out their western fantasies, guests are welcomed to the pioneer town by artificially intelligent…

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This Hermès Collection circa 1952 Needs a Comeback

Paris fashion week has kicked off over here and the style world is abuzz with what trends we’ll be wearing two seasons from now. So while they’re worrying about all that, trust Messy Nessy to still be looking backwards more than half a century for wardrobe inspiration. Take this 1952 fashion shoot I dug up…

Daguerreotypes of Anonymous African Americans

Simply because we don’t see enough of this– material record of black history, that is. I came across the Randolph Linsly Simpson Collection in Yale’s online archives at the Beinecke Library, which includes letters, prints, film clips and formal studio portraits of African Americans. For more than 25 years, Randolph Linsly Simpson, a white man whose…

Ghosts of Nigeria: A Colonialist’s Photo Album

I had a good dig through the British National Archives this morning and began fixating on the “Nigeria” album, containing over 900 photographs from the Colonial Office photographic collection. It’s an exhaustive album of portraits and documentation of the photographer’s tour through what was then Colonial Nigeria in the late 19th century. The photographs capture so…

After a Decade of Renovation, the National Library of France has Reopened

Last week we went to poke our heads inside the recently unveiled National Library of France, a 556 year-old collection in the heart of Paris that has been under wraps for a decade for renovation work. Take a quick tour with us below: In the early 2000s, the building had become too outdated for…

Window Shop in Art Deco Paris

It was a lucky link I found on Pinterest that led me by chance to the digital image catalogue of the Wolfsonian-FIU, a treasure trove of rare books rescued from obscurity. Deep within the collection of more than 100,000 images, two dog-eared books acquired from the French archives published in the early 1930s have been digitally…

Drive-in Church, 1947

I get really excited about anything you can drive through– movie theatres, restaurants, car washes, trees– it just feels very old school Americana, when the country’s love affair with the automobile was in full swing. Today I found these photographs of a drive-in church in St. Petersburg, Florida circa 1947 for a feature in LIFE magazine that never…