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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities

Category / How to start a subculture

October 9, 2018

Invasion of the Kitschy Carpets

Don’t worry, you’re not tripping. Give your eyes another rub, and you’ll realise you’re just being momentarily hypnotised by the felted creations of Makoto Egashira, the Japanese artist with a Midas touch. Only, swap the gold for your granny’s gaudy carpeting. From pineapples, to rocking chairs, teacups, even entire bathrooms and groups of people — nothing…

October 2, 2018

Don’t Mess With the Jiu-jitsu Suffragettes

It’s Edwardian Era Glasgow, circa 1914, and the stress mounting in St. Andrews’s Hall is unbearable. Flocks of Suffragettes and policemen are waiting for the woman of the hour, Emmeline Pankhurst, to magically surface and fight against her own arrest — the tension is so palpable, you could cut it with a knife. Or karate-chop…

September 21, 2018

The Inexplicably Fascinating Japanese Art of Being Useless

“Not always useful, but not altogether useless” is the mantra behind Chindōgu, a Japanese art form that calls for stilettos with built-in umbrellas, noodle bibs for the face, and glue sticks filled with butter (that one we get). They’re nonsensical inventions on a mission, missing the mark of utility by a hair, and on purpose. “I…

August 28, 2018

How to Make an American Anti-Hero

They crusaded with horns sprouting from their heads, and rifles slung across their backs. Legend has it they decreed the virtues of the Holy Bible in one hand, and a torch in the other. They were known as the “Bald Knobbers,” and for a period of time in the lawless Ozark Mountains of post-Civil War…

August 8, 2018

Once Upon a Summer in Black Eden…

Today, the glory days of Idlewild feel a bit like a fever dream. Just ask any of the African American vacationers who made the pilgrimage to the Michigan resort from the 1910s-60s. “It was something that you’d never believe…stranger than fiction,” reflects one woman in Coy Davis Jr.’s documentary, Whatever Happened to Idlewild? In the midst of Jim…

August 7, 2018

How One Frenchman Became the World’s Most Beloved Lesbian Poet

We thought we’d heard it all when it came to imposters. Clearly, we hadn’t met Pierre Louÿs. The French writer had Europe’s literary scene eating out of the palm of his hand, and was decorated as a Chevalier and Officier de la Légion d’honneur in his lifetime, two of his country’s highest honours, that would never have been awarded…

July 17, 2018

We Just Walked into America’s Creepiest Egyptian-UFO Cult

Not long ago in Georgia, black and gold pyramids stood proudly on the 476-acre compound of Tama-Rey. It was the holy “Land of the Sun,” a place where the self-declared God, Dr. Malachi Z. York, manipulated thousands of nationwide followers in the “Nuwaubian Nation of Moors” to believe they were cosmic purveyors of an extraterrestrial…

July 4, 2018

Discovering Black Outsider Art in a Whitewashed World

Their abilities don’t come from any artistic establishment. They didn’t have any formal training and they were not influenced by other mainstream artists. Hailing from places like Mississippi, Tallapoosa, and other rural pockets of the deep south, they’re the African American Outsider and Folk artists whose voices and colour palettes explored a world that wasn’t…

June 27, 2018

And the Award for Most Fashionable UFO Cult Goes to…

Ruth Norman, hands down. The gilded leader of “Unarius,” a UFO cult founded with her husband Ernest in 1954, Ruth was not only a figurehead for “interdimensional understanding” but a master at putting together looks fit for an intergalactic space queen. So let’s throw on our tiara and refuel our rocket to explore some of…

June 20, 2018

The Kids Who Burned New York

The club kids burned bright and fast. They were the society misfits. The ‘freaks’. A sharp cocktail of young drag queens who built a community out of their craft, and a cast of constantly rotating nightlife characters with one common mantra: be whatever you want, but just don’t be boring. In the spirit of Pride…