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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities
Category / Fashion for Dummies
October 9, 2018

How to Outdo Every Halloween Costume at the Party

You don’t want to be that person at the costume party. You know, the one who’s scrawled some whiskers across their cheek to be a last minute black cat, or just turned up with a sheet over their head and declared it a costume. But we also aren’t ones for perusing overpriced, polyester outfits in a crowded…
October 2, 2018

Discover a Secret Fashion Time Capsule in Paris

When I think of Paris fashion week, I like to think of the historic couture houses and their army of skilled artisans furiously tailoring together glorious silks and handmade fabrics in the final hours before the show. I like to picture long-standing ateliers in the garment district; life-sized dollhouses; each floor with its own particular…
September 27, 2018

One Last Shopping Spree at a New York Icon of Fashion

For 123 years, Camelot was on 5th Avenue, otherwise known as the Henri Bendel department store, the place to be for any fashionable woman worth her salt in 20th century America. So when the timeless Manhattan mainstay announced its imminent, forever closure this month, we kind of lost it. Needed a hat that looked like a…
September 27, 2018

This 1950s French Lingerie Show will Make You Blush

We fell into yet another rabbit hole today when we stumbled upon a scene from the 1954 film,  Ah! Les Belles Bacchantes. It was marketed as the very first French burlesque film starring “the 100 most beautiful French women,” and one of the greatest French slapstick comedians of all time. Above all it oozed sex appeal, comedy,…
September 26, 2018

The Secret Lives of Fashion Mannequins

For a brief moment in the 1930s, one of the most famous celebrities of the day was a 100-pound mannequin named Cynthia. She had box seats at the Metropolitan Opera, received freebies from Tiffany and Cartier, graced the cover of Life magazine and was even invited to the wedding of Edward V111 and Wallis Simpson.…
September 21, 2018

Meet the Godfather of Voguing

Willi Ninja did far more than “strike a pose”. Before Madonna was Voguing for the masses on MTV in 1990, the niche dance form was being created by black and latino drag queens during the ballroom era of 1960’s Harlem, New York. It was Willi Ninja, an ambitious young dancer, who pioneered Voguing, and used it to…
August 21, 2018

What Happened to Picasso’s Forgotten Teenage Muse?

For a few Spring months in 1954, a melancholy Picasso found himself enraptured by 19-year-old Sylvette David. Of all the muses who bookmarked his life — and there were many — she’s fallen to the wayside of history as one of the most enigmatic and misunderstood. For years, critics wrote the body of work she…
June 22, 2018

Ode to the Ladies Pant Suit of Zanzibar

When fashion has been borrowed from the past over and over again, it’s rare to find something that you haven’t seen before. I was browsing through snippets of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, and noticed that among the historic photographs captured throughout East Africa from the 1890s-1920s, there was one…
June 6, 2018

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…
June 1, 2018

The Hair That Launched a Thousand Tweets

Stop what you’re doing, and take a seat, because senator Valentina Petrenko’s hair is about to sweep you off your feet with its gravity-defying fabulousness. This Russian politician has been captivating the internet recently with her truly one-of-a-kind look, becoming quite the Twitter starlet, and leaving folks bewildered as to how she manages to keep it all…
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Mum & Dad named me Vanessa, but you can call me Nessy.