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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities
Category / How to start a subculture

How Guillotine Haircuts became all the Rage in France

During the height of the French Revolution, France had just about lost its mind. The “Reign of Terror” was as terrible as it sounds. Rising revolutionary politicians like Maximilien Robespierre, were accusing everyone and their mother of treason against the new republic and some 16,500 people were killed by guillotine in a single year. The accusers…

But Did You Hear about France’s Most Infamous Madam?

With the Jeffrey Epstein scandal creeping its way into every late night dinner table conversation and the sordid secrets of his mysterious Madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, slowly unfolding in the press, it wasn’t long before we would be talking about “Madame Claude”. France’s own high society brothel queen, aka. Fernande Grudet, reigned for decades as one…

New York’s Real-Life Handmaid’s Tale

Revivalist sects, polyamorous communes and radical experiments in communal living – America was rife with it all in the mid 19th century – but not exactly where you might expect. Forget the Bible Belt. In western New York state, so many religious revival groups seemed to be popping up in and setting it afire with…

Volunteering for Life on Mars, or Something Like it

Somewhere out in the Utah desert right now, there are a bunch of folks pretending to live on Mars. The simulated Martian habitat, known as the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), is the closest you can get to the red planet here on earth, where science projects are created for space, and tasks that astronauts…

Meet Me at the Wigstock Festival: Remembering NYC Summers in Drag

It was the drag world’s biggest block party. From the heat of 1980s New York, equal parts glitter and grime, the “Wigstock” festival exploded onto the streets as a place for queens to hold court when no one else would have them. Today, watching jaw-dropping drag is as easy as going online or turning on…

Meet the Winners of Drag Race 100 Years Ago

Hoist up your garters and fasten your wigs, because we’re voguing our way back in time to the origins of drag ball extravaganzas: those champagne and lipstick fuelled soirées where drag queens, cross-dressers, and everybody in-between gathered to unfurl their fabulousness in style – and just like on the main stage of the hit TV…

The Curious Career of Living as a Real-Life Garden Gnome

If you were out of a job in 19th century England and seeking new employment, there was a chance you might find a peculiar advertisement in the newspaper that read something like: “WANTED! Ornamental garden hermit“. The profession would essentially require you to become a human ornamental folly on the grounds of a wealthy family…

Wet Hot Parisian Summer: A Lost 1930s Nudist Utopia

In Physiopolis, life was better in the buff. Or at least in a bikini, which was as close as one could legally get to public nudity in 1930s Paris. It was here, on an isolated sun-baked island on the Seine, that a titillating new naturiste-nudiste (naturalist and nude) movement sprang forth. Gone were the days…

The Last Great California Hippie Commune is still going Strong

They came from the mountains, and kept to themselves. If you were lucky, you might have seen them frolicking in the hills under the glow of the buttery, golden hour sunshine that California does so well. Collectively, they were known as “The Brotherhood of the Sun,” and in the 1970s, they emerged as one of…
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