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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities
Category / Movie / Music / Book Junkie

Manhattan’s Long Lost Era of Loft Jazz

Once upon a time, before Manhattan priced out its young talent, you had to be an artist to live in SoHo. And in the late 1960s and 70s, a cultural phenomenon known as “Loft Jazz” came into existence in downtown Manhattan’s abandoned industrial spaces. Eclectic, edgy and often Black musicians turned Soho’s neglected lofts into…

The Soundtrack To A Lost Country: Rock Music in the GDR

To the leaders of Communist East Germany, nothing was quite as dangerous and potentially subversive to their nation’s youth as Western rock and pop music. By 1965, Beatlemania may have been at its height with the band regularly attracting seventy million viewers on the Ed Sullivan show, but behind the Iron Curtain, the Party State…

When Big Brands were Getting High in the Seventies

In the late 1960s and 70s, America’s big corporations could see the psychedelic writing on the wall and they knew they had to do something. A wave of psychedelia was taking over pop culture and the LSD-infused hippie aesthetic was huge. The influence of drug culture on some of the most iconic brands saw everyone…

“Now that, is an Episode of the Kardashians We’d Watch”

You can imagine them in a Wes Anderson movie too – Owen Wilson is being chased by a sheep and the camera pans over to Trio Mandili, a Georgian musical group of three young women who sing folk songs polyphonically, accompanied by a traditional string instrument known as a panduri. They’re big on Youtube, with 782K subscribers at…

Hollywood’s Beguiling Queen of Pre-Code Cinema

If Norma Shearer doesn’t ring a bell like other legendary names of the silver screen might, then you too, have fallen victim to the Hays Code. Before we even knew it as “Hollywood”, the American film industry was producing a surreal amount of extraordinarily liberal and racy movies dominated by strong unapologetic female characters, homosexual…

Refine your Moodboard with this 1970s French Fairytale

These are a few of my favourite things about a 1970s French musical called “Donkey Skin”: A giant cat throne, a surreal banquet with candy-coloured flora, a snow globe grave, talking roses and parrots, Catherine Deneuve as a Disney-esque princess, the deeply saturated colour palette, fashion tech ahead of its time, oh and pretty much…

What We Can Learn from a Bollywood Blockbuster about Periods

“The curse. Bloody Mary. Time of the Month. Shark Week. Code Red. Aunt Flo.” All over the world, euphemisms exist to discretely convey those four simple words: “I have my period”. In the media, the word ‘period’ was not mentioned on television until the 1980s and it seems the western approach for combatting period stigma is…

Bridgerton’s Black Presence isn’t Total Fantasy, it’s Hidden History

There’s a reason why Google autofills questions about the authenticity of Black presence in 17th and 18th century Europe – lots of people are asking. The hit Netflix show Bridgerton is Shonda Rimes’ first historical drama, but anyone who enjoys the screenwriter’s work (be it Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal and many more), knows that…

The Forgotten Cafés where the British Beats Used To Meet

We have all heard of the Beat Generation, but have you been keeping up with the Kardomahs? Across the pond from Ginsberg’s gang and a couple of decades earlier, there was a group of bohemian artists and writers who beat them to it. The Kardomah Gang are Wales’ and the world’s forgotten intellectual boyband, who…
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