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A Life Less Ordinary with a Real-Life Snow White

Deep inside one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe, in-between Belarus and Poland, stands an old hunting lodge straight out of a fairytale. For over 30 years, ecologist Simona Kossack lived in this secluded glade without amenities nor electricity or running water and with an unusual band of forest friends. There was a…

The Lost Art of Cyanotype, Found Again

There’s something in the window of my boutique on Paris’ Left Bank that has been stopping wanderers in their tracks. It’s that mesmerising shade of deep Prussian blue, the result of a 19th-century photographic process known as cyanotype, once favoured by Victorian botanists and early female pioneers of photography. Today, cyanotype has found a second…

The Flickering Portal to a Forgotten World of Personal Screens

It appears we’ve come full circle. Picture a time before smartphones, Youtube, Tik Tok, streaming services, or even the modern movie theater as we know it — a time when a few moments of visual entertainment involved peeking into a mysterious, boxy machine and cranking a handle. Back in the late 19th and early 20th…

France, Is That Really You?

Ah, la douce France! Cobblestone streets and cafés lost in time, quaint little ancient villages surrounded by vineyards, heart-achingly beautiful architecture and skylines, just like you’ve seen it in the movies. Right? Well sure, but that’s only half of the story. Sometimes, France can look like the Eastern Bloc. Sometimes, it can look like the…

These Overlooked Fashion Icons were More than Just Pretty Faces

Remember the supermodel-celebrities of the nineties, the ones who wouldn’t get out of bed for under $10 000 a day? Casting a glance a little further back into fashion history, there’s a host of equally noteworthy style muses with diverse achievements in politics, education, literature and entertainment (… mind you, their celebrity romances were rather juicy…

America’s Hidden “Mad Men” Age of Black Advertising

Style and smiles all-round, saturated to the max; sexy undertones complete with sexist overtones and carefree capitalism – those iconic mid-century advertisements weren’t just unique to the magazine pages of white America. In the 1950s and ’60s, the notorious advertisers of Madison Avenue, aka the real-life “Mad Men”, sought out African American dollars too. Unbeknownst…

Paul Is Dead: The bizarre conspiracy that became part of The Beatles phenomenon

‘’Those freaks was right when they said you was dead” spat John Lennon in the 1971 song ‘How Do You Sleep?’ It was a venomous retort to his ex-bandmate Paul McCartney in an ongoing feud after the break-up of The Beatles. But what he meant by these caustic lines is a little more outré. These…

An American Gigolo in Europe

Whatever that intangible ‘It’ factor is, the gods bestowed it on Denham ‘Denny’ Fouts in disproportionate quantities. He was blessed with more natural-born charisma than Leonardo Di Caprio, Brad Pitt and The Talented Mr Ripley put together. Denny Fouts exuded a carnal mojo of the kind that compelled a Greek king, German baron and a…

The First Birth Control Handbook, Written by a Group of Teenagers in 1968

So it turns out, the famous “free love” movement of the 1960s, wasn’t so free – what with a total lack of information and availability of birth control. With the youth movement came a dramatic rise in unintended pregnancies. Abortions were illegal and carried a life term in prison; the birth control pill was only…

13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. DLXXX)

1. The Cinéorama At the 1900 Paris Exposition, the Lumière brothers, who had made the first public projections of a motion picture in 1895, presented their films on a colossal screen, as well as a primitive talking motion picture. An even more ambitious experiment in motion pictures however, was the Cinéorama of Raoul Grimoin Sanson, which simulated a voyage…

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