Amelia Earhart’s Forgotten Fashion Line (could probably do with a comeback)

The idea of the celebrity fashion line dates as far back as 1850, when a wildly popular Swedish opera singer named Jenny Lind decided to top up her high-grossing ticket sales with a range of Jenny Lind-branded merchandise, including gloves, bonnets and shawls. Then came silent film star Irene Castle, dubbed the “best-dressed woman in…

The Last House of Fans, Paris

There was once a secret language used by women for centuries to communicate unspoken sentiments across the room. It was the code of duchesses and ladies-in-waiting; women who made bi-weekly trips to the opera armed with an exquisite accessory that with a simple flick of her wrist, could declare her true feelings for a gentleman sat across…

Who was the Original Lady Gaga?

Female Dandyism isn’t just about donning a Pair of Brogues… In her outfits made out of animal flesh, the gimp masks and alien egg-vessels (that thing she hatched from during her 2011 Grammy performance), you wouldn’t think to describe Lady Gaga as a dandy. But if you take a closer look, you’ll discover that much…

An Insider Peep into Tokyo’s Secretive Red Light District: Then & Now

Watanabe Katsumi was the king of treading lightly. As a drifting photographer, his lens was a stealthy observer of Tokyo’s red light district, snapping hundreds of photos of its drag queens, gangsters, prostitutes, and other fringe society members in the 1960s and 70s. Few dared enter the underbelly of the city like him and the…

Donna Summer is the Overlooked Style Icon that We Need to Get our Sparkle Back

The late, great Donna Summer was so much more than a disco queen. Did you know she was a painter too? But we’ll get to that in a moment. Donna began her musical career in high school in the late 1960s when she became the lead singer of a psychedelic rock band named Crow. At the…

Preserved Moments of Historical, Indisputable Black Style

I haven’t done one of these style compendiums in a while, so this is long overdue. And this is also for all those internet retrospectives on vintage style that don’t include a single Black face. It was a hard task narrowing down my favourites from thousands of found snapshots floating around out there on the world…

Madame Mori, Haute Couture’s Real Madame Butterfly

European fashion designers have been inspired by Japan since it open its borders for trade in 1853. But while the art coming out of Japan was often appreciated and admired, the asian artists themselves have not always been welcomed with such open arms. One example of this admiration of Japanese aesthetics without a true understanding…

The Stylehunters of Soviet Russia

In communist Russia of the 1950s, members of a provocative subculture put their own original twist on street style. Labeled “Stilyaga” or “Stilyagi” (plural) by disapproving outsiders – a name that literally translates to stylehunter – a group of dandy youngsters dressed up in colorful American-inspired get ups to meet on Leningrad and Moscow’s main…

The Vault

The “Unknown” Photographer who Documented the Cool Kats of Mid-Century Mali

At a New York art exhibition in the early 90s, three black & white photographs hung on the white walls, credited to a photographer “Unknown“. The portraits of fashionably dressed people and families taken between 1940 and the early sixties were actually the work of a nationally renowned photographer in Mali. Outside of his country however, Seydou Keita…

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Korean Cowboys of the Old World

Wisemen, dapper dudes, cowboys of the far east– I’m not really sure what to call them, I just know I’ve been charmed by these old world photographs of Korean style captured by visiting foreigners before the country was torn in half. It all started with this photograph from the Cornell University Library, of a Korean boatman…