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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities
Category / Nostalgia
MessyNessy

The Lost Romance of the Transylvanian Spa Town

We walked with ghosts through a crumbling spa town in the valley of the Cerna river, where Empresses and Kings of Bohemia once came to “take the waters”. An early morning mist rose from the sulphurs of the riverbed, crawling through the empty streets. Whistling through shattered windows and vast corridors, the wind seemed to…
Francky Knapp

Unsung Heros of WWII: The All-Female WASP Squad

Where this is a will, there’s a way — but for pilot Jacqueline Cochrane, there had to be even more. “To live without risk, for me,” she said, “would be tantamount to death.” One of the biggest risks of her career was pioneering the US organisation, WASPS (Women Airforce Service Pilots). In the heat of…
Francky Knapp

That One Time Coca-Cola Made a Dystopian Soda

No one quite knew what to do with Generation X (born from the late 1960s to the early ’80s), but marketers were especially stumped at how they could appeal to this new, generation of globalisation that was disillusioned with the status quo. The heart of the matter was, and remains, incredibly subversive – a challenge…
MessyNessy

Free the Nipple, says History

Nipple slips must have been a real problem in the 17th century. Or rather, not so much a problem per se, as an everyday practice. If you’ve ever walked around a portrait gallery of Renaissance European art or watched a few period films set around that time when the cup did truly runneth over, you…
Francky Knapp

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…
MessyNessy

Paris is Removing its Iconic Kiosks. So What Will Become of Them?

I woke up one morning in Paris, headed to the boulangerie, when I noticed a strange new structure had been installed on the sidewalk overnight. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. One of those self-cleaning public toilets? A construction crew’s cabin for yet another roadwork about to begin? And then…
Francky Knapp

Journey to Zealandia, Earth’s Hidden 8th Continent

Beneath the crystalline waters of the South Pacific, 32 scientists from 12 countries emerged after a nine-week voyage to the depths. They’d been drilling for samples from a long-lost world, on a quest that sounds a whole lot like the premise of a Jules Verne novel: the expedition to Zealandia. Not that far beneath the…
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Mum & Dad named me Vanessa, but you can call me Nessy.

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