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Category / Editor’s Picks

The Lost Art and Innovation of Milk Plastic

Got milk? Pour yourself a glass and gulp down some little-known history about the household staple. In the early decades of the 20th century, milk was commonly used to make many plastic ornaments, including jewellery, gemstones, buttons, decorative buckles, fountain pens, fancy comb and brush sets and even piano keys. Milk plastic was even used to adorn Chanel’s…

Struck with Style: Lightning Rod Fashion of the 18th Century

Unfathomably whacky fashions have seen the light over the ages. Take the perilous hobble skirt of the early 1910s that deliberately impeded its wearer’s ability to walk, or the gentleman’s codpiece that drew eyes to his genital area for most of 16th century Europe. We’ve dug up yet another surprising fashion trend of yore courtesy…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. 663)

1. This penthouse by Le Corbusier in 1920s Paris During the Parisian annèes folles, he [Carlos de Beistegui] selected Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to design a machine à amuser, a penthouse on the Champs-Élysées dedicated entirely to entertaining and hosting crazy Parisian parties typical of those years, characterized by a brilliant and festive atmosphere of…

The Desert Town Built Around a Mirage, Come True

When I imagine a mirage, I think of epic tales of adventure and perilous journeys through the desert where our hero is dangerously lost, hallucinating in the barren landscape ahead. Rarely does the mirage turn out to be something real. Except this one did, and you don’t have to be a character in a storybook…

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

1. The Cinéorama At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Lumière brothers, who had made the first public projections of a motion picture in 1895, presented their films on a colossal screen, as well as a primitive talking motion picture. An even more ambitious experiment in motion pictures however, was the Cinéorama of Raoul Grimoin Sanson, which simulated a voyage…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. 662)

1. Billy Burke (aka Glinda the Good Witch) was the Original Fashion Influencer Before the runway there was Broadway. And before fashion influencers there was Billie Burke. And before she was Glinda the Good Witch, Billy Burke was the original fashion influencer. Burke was a stage actress in the early 1900s at a time when…

Adult Playground Holiday Homes: A Closer look at the Supersized New Travel Trend

Some of us may dream of relaxing at a serene beach villa or a cosy little cottage nestled amidst a luscious landscape, but if a popular new category created for the Airbnb market is any indication of current travel moods, there appears to be a growing demand to vacation on what can only be described…

The Great Binge: An Unsettling Reality Check of the Drug-Fuelled “Belle Epoque”

Curiously absent from our historical timelines is “The Great Binge”, a more recently-coined but arguably more appropriate term for that famous period at the turn of the century which we typically refer to as the “Belle Epoque” or the “Gilded Age”. This wasn’t just a time when culture and industry flourished however, it was also…

Footnoted as Modigliani’s First Muse: The 13 Voices of a Modernist Pioneer

It’s the first decade of the twentieth century, and you’re in London reading the avant-garde weekly magazine, The New Age. A writer you’ve been enjoying, a women’s suffrage advocate named Beatrice Tina has been arguing, via the “Letters to the Editor” section, with someone called D. Triformis. But recently, they’ve managed to find some common…

Forget Versailles, Tune into the Forgotten Château that Became France’s Abbey Road

Imagine the sweet sound of a duet between Elton John and Frédéric Chopin, or a Van Gogh painting interpreted in song by David Bowie. What if the lyrics for a Fleetwood Mac verse or a Pink Floyd anthem were ghost written by the famed 19th century female novelist George Sand? There’s only one place that…

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