Time Capsule found in the Basement of a major Internet Hub

There is no feeling quite like it, when you realize you’ve discovering something that’s been entirely forgotten and frozen in time. Cabel is the co-founder of a Mac and iOs software company in Portland, Oregon called Panic– not your everyday time-capsule explorer! But one day, Cabel decided to take a lonesome wander down to the basement…

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…

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…

The Place Where World War One Planes Still Fly

Wander through the quaint, old fashioned town of Rhinebeck in New York’s Hudson Valley, and you may feel as though you’ve stepped back to another era. Especially when you look up into the sky: for its quite common to see vintage airplanes circling high above all day long, the distinctive sound of old, single propeller…

A Brief Compendium of Beautiful Bird Cages

I‘m less interested in keeping a bird in a cage than I am in keeping a cage– minus the bird. This is one of those purely indulgent posts where the internet has turned my passive admiration for something into near-obsession. It starts somewhere like Pinterest or eBay and goes something like this: Say, that’s a great…

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Cigarette Dispensers

“Tobacciana.” That’s a big ‘ole blanket term for all things smoking-obsessed. Not very 2020, perhaps (and for good reason! Don’t smoke, kids). But the reality is that until relatively recently, folks smoked a lot. So they were getting rather creative with the ways they lit-up, especially when it came to their cigarette dispensers. These often…

Search for the 235 Anonymous Souls of Studio “Foto Americain”

Ernst Lalleman doesn’t make friends like the rest of us. “I was mesmerized by the quality, as if I could hear the voices of these people talking to me from the past,” he told us about the collection of 235 portrait negatives he found so many years ago, and have been his silent companions ever…

Practice Your French While Time Travelling through Paris

In my ongoing quest to help bring you to Paris by any means, today we’re diving into one of my favourite resources for revisiting la vielle ville (the old town). The ‘Institut national de l’audiovisuel’ (INA) is a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives and within their Youtube channel, you can find…

An Ode to what they call “Duck Architecture”

Now I know. Did you? There’s an official name for all those kitschy roadside buildings shaped like the merchandise they’re selling. Most popular in the 1920s and 30s, giant coffee pots, hot dogs, ice cream cones, beer barrels, farm animals and other eye-catching buildings sprang up along the roadside, competing for the attention of passing…

The Lost Industry of Sign Painters

Sometimes I wonder about things like, who’s going to know how to make a piano in twenty years? Which skills will go extinct when the last generations of craftsmen and artisans can’t pass on the legacy of their trade? Forbes recently reported that despite a stubbornly high unemployment rate, skilled trades top the list of…