Fashion’s Forgotten Bébé

Fabulous, free and fashionable, France bloomed in the 1930s. The avant-garde arts flourished, Paris was at the centre of it all and her output was bountiful. The creative giants of the day, Picasso, Cocteau, Coco Chanel, May Ray, Beauvoir and Sartre, the Lost Generation and their cultural circle basked in a warm summer evening’s glow…

Girl Crush du Jour: Vanessa Paradis

Perhaps it’s because we share the first name (yes, if you haven’t figured it out, Nessy is short for Vanessa), perhaps it’s because she’s a Parisian and I’m now attempting to call myself one or maybe it’s just because we both like Johnny Depp– whatever the reason, Vanessa Paradis is my girl crush du jour.…

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Interview with a Parisian Burlesque Dancer

I was at a masked party one evening in Paris when Marie Antoinette showed up in nothing but her underwear, albeit very pretty underwear indeed. She prowled sumptuously about the room until she found a stage and proceeded to perform the most hypnotising dance with two giant feather fans. Who is that woman behind the feathers? What is…

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The Forgotten LGBT Queen of Paris and Her Secret Masonic Temple

She was the kind of woman who never belonged to anyone but herself. At least, when it came to love. But for Natalie Clifford Barney, life overflowed with colour, creativity, and passion in Paris’ Left Bank during one of city’s most romantic periods. Think of her as a lesser-known Gertrude Stein, albeit one who curated…

Where the Nazis Hung Out in Occupied Paris

Today I found a photograph of an ordinary German coffee shop circa 1941, with German signage above the windows that read “Soldatenkaffee Madeleine“. What made this photograph of a coffee shop so very unordinary, was that it was not taken in Germany, but on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris during the Nazi occupation. How many other places like…

The “Other” Lost Generation of Black American Artists in Paris

Originally, this was supposed to be a pretty straight-forward piece on an American ex-pat artist whose enchanting paintings of 1930s Paris I’d recently had the fortune of stumbling across via the internet. She was a young woman who had moved to France before the war, where her painting career began to flourish. I was going…

The Mystery of Baudelaire’s Maddening Mistress

There’s love. There’s lust. Then there’s Jeanne DuVal, who embodied something between the two in her tumultuous relationship with Charles Baudelaire, France’s original “bad boy” poet. As a muse to the rebellious Parisian dandy, she inspired some of the most haunting, revolutionary verses in history – odes to the woman he loved to love, and…

The X-Rated Paris Grave

In Paris’ city of the dead, where winding cobblestone pathways have their own street signs, graves look like small gothic houses and the likes of Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde have been laid to rest, there is one grave amongst the maze of tombs in Père Lachaise cemetery that’s not quite like the others. And apparently,…

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

In celebration of the release of MessyNessyChic’s first book, “Don’t be a Tourist in Paris“, I’m dedicating today’s 13 Things to the city that inspired it all. 1. A French beekeeper makes Honey wine in the Paris catacombs Mead, sometimes known as honey wine, is a mix of water and honey that, like wine, must be…

Working Girls of Place Blanche: Documenting the Parisian Sex Trade

Our story takes place in 1950s and 60s Paris at Place Blanche, in the shadows of Montmartre, in the heart of the red light district of Pigalle. France was ruled by a devout Catholic, General Charles de Gaulle, who had reinstated a 300-year-old law that punished landlords who allowed prostitutes to work on their premises by…