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Cabinet of Chic Curiosities

Category / Nostalgia

Olympia Le-Tan transformed “Don’t be a Tourist” Books into Clutch Bags!

As an author and purveyor of curiosities, if there was ever a collaboration to be had, this was always it! So it is with great honour that we reveal the Olympia Le-Tan x Don’t be a Tourist Limited Edition embroidered Clutch bags, now available for curious collectors at OlympiaLeTan.com.

The Quest for the Irish Atlantis Is a Thing

Every seven years, it emerged from the mist. The isle of “Hy-Brasil,” aka the ancient Irish Atlantis bound to the whims of the sea, revered by locals as the home of their pagan gods, or else, as the outpost of a lone magician and his castle – the rumour mill never stopped churning. Nor did…

Before Disneyland Paris, there was Human Roulette and Drag Balls at the Lost “Magic City”

Dragons curled up under the bridge. Toboggans splashed Parisians in to the Seine, benches twirled, and wine flowed freely. It was a Saturday afternoon like any other at the “Magic City” of Paris, the long lost fun fair that was the nation’s very first parc d’attractions. As such, it was quite literally the gateway to…

Liberating Paris with Mixed Reality

Vive la resistance! Join me 600m below Paris to liberate the city in a special new “Don’t be a Tourist” episode with Microsoft. Discover a WWII bunker deserted for decades and relive the liberation of Paris with HoloLens mixed reality technology through the eyes of French resistance fighters in the underworld.

The ’90s are Still Alive & Well at this Totally Ace Airbnb

Jauntily hung Friends posters, VHS movies, gel pens, furniture that looks like it’s been taken straight off the set of Saved by the Bell, and nonsensical – but absolutely necessary – squiggly lines on every surface. We love the 1990s more than Cher Horowitz loved her Alaia handbag, so naturally, we lost it when we…

When Vegetarians were considered so Radical, they only Belonged in Isolated Utopian Communes

No kings. No priests. No aristocracies. Only a society whose residents believed they should “grow together — not by competition, but by united action.” It may sound like a Bob Dylan lyric, but it’s a 104-yr-old excerpt from Herland, the science fiction novel by suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gillman in which a money free, farming heavy,…

The Lost Art of Decorating with Shells

In Margate, on the south-east coast of England, there is an underground grotto lined with majestic mosaics made entirely of seashells – and no-one knows how it got there. The site was discovered in 1835 by a father and son who were attempting to dig a duck pond. The story goes that the young boy…

Inside the Secret Parisian Warehouse where the French Presidents Go Furniture Shopping

Picture an IKEA warehouse – but make it chic – and add an inventory of priceless furniture, textiles and objects that date as far back as the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who indisputably raised the bar on what we’ll call French ‘power decorating’ for centuries to come. A sprawling Art Deco reinforced…

The Undertaker Village of Paris: Then & Now

It was a time when divorcées were only allowed to be buried at night, when the Arch of Triomphe wore a black mourning veil, and the business of death was booming in Paris. In fact, over one thousand undertakers worked together in their own veritable mini-city at the town’s edge, from coffin makers and casket…

The Overlooked Occult Movie Legend who holds Hollywood’s Darkest Secrets

As an artist and an outsider, Kenneth Anger was the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol – a California boy who hosted rituals for the Church of Satan in his San Francisco mansion, and introduced the Rolling Stones to the occult; a man who found a muse in Mick Jagger, but a bigger one in…

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