How the Last Great American Flower Factory Still Blooms Over Midtown, NYC

Once upon a time, a woman needed a parrot tulip. Not just any tulip. “She started with something like this,” explains Adam Brand, heir to his family’s 4th generation flower factory business, M&S Schmalberg. He picks up a few flat, flower shaped layers of fabric. “Then we took some little poofs, some hibiscus, all different…

This Guy Knits ‘Ugly Sweaters’ for Every Place He Goes

Not all heros wear capes. Sam Barsky, for example, wears sweaters. Nearly 200 of them at this point. The Baltimore, Maryland native has taken the internet by storm recently with his talent for knitting sweaters of, well, everything, from the glory of Stonehenge to the streets of Baltimore; an incoming tram, or the Hollywood sign.…

Vintage Muse du Jour: Anna Karina

Anna Karina arrived in Paris at the age of seventeen from Denmark. She spoke no French and performed on the streets for money. One day, while sitting at the famous Café Deux Margots on the boulevard Saint-Germain, she was discovered by an advertising agent who asked her to do some photos. She would soon find…

The Other English Royals

I‘m feeling terribly British these days. Of course, I’m not, and I now live across the channel in French enemy territory, but I did grow up there and always felt a sense of loyalty and affection towards the great kingdom that raised me. With a new royal wedding around the corner, I’m feeling all sorts…

Lessons in Historical Male Peacocking, from Lord Gaga to the King of Afrofuturism

They’re performers. Dandies. Men with a streak of the mad poet. Writers, dancers, and professional party boys. Though these eccentrics span across generations, all share a brazen commitment to being themselves that’s made for some of the most memorable menswear moments in the 19th and 20th centuries. Long before fashion was giving the middle finger…

The Questionable Business of Being Frida

As the 1930s, the Frida Kahlo gained international notoriety as “Diego Rivera’s wife”, gracing the cover of French Vogue. Then, she floored the avant-garde scene with artworks whose vulnerability spoke from the heart while their rawness punched you in the gut. The public ate it up, despite not always knowing how to digest it. Posthumously,…

Interview with the Vintage Guru of Namibia

This is why I love the internet. Today I got to chat with Loux the Vintage Guru based in Namibia, Africa, whose Tumblr site I recently discovered and fell instantly under its spell. The budding fashion designer and all-round exquisitely-dressed dude is making waves with a collective of twenty-something like-minded style innovators to promote the…

Stalin’s Fashion House: Style Spying behind the Iron Curtain

For many, “Soviet fashion” reads like an oxymoron. One simply can’t imagine that funding fashion ateliers was high up on Joseph Stalin’s to-do list, and it wasn’t, but still — it was there, and apparently it was utterly extravagant. “Eclectic mannequins were turning slowly as they displayed rather bewildering clothes,” wrote Elsa Schiaparelli of the…

The Day the Shorts got Shorter

After this most deepest and darkest of winters (aren’t they always), what I’m more than ready for the sort of weather that just makes you want to burst out of the house and run the streets in short shorts. This is basically what is happening in these photographs I fished out of the LIFE archives… With LIFE’s…

The ’80s Harlem Hip Hop Tailor: Dapper Dan

He was selling custom-made clothing to Hip Hop’s finest for thousands of dollars a piece, fashioned from rolls of fake Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Fendi prints out of his Harlem boutique during the 1980s. His name is Dapper Dan and before the likes of Kanye West and Rihanna were doing it, this guy was the…