Momofuku Ando makes noodles © Mainichi Have you ever felt like you’ve started late in life? Have you ever experienced an epic failure in your professional career and felt like giving up? That you’re “past it” and it’s “too late” to make something of yourself? Meet Momofuku Ando, none other than the eccentric character who […]
Pasaquan, the visionary arts complex designed by Eddie Owens Martin, also known as St. EOM. Photo by Jennifer L. Mason. Venturing down an unassuming gravel road grown over with grass in rural Marion County, Georgia, you’re met by a huge pair of piercing blue eyes. Look around, and you’re met by many more sets of
Garden’s FB Paul Gardner; the man, the myth, the London legend. If you ever have the pleasure of purchasing a paper bag from Paul, count yourself lucky. Like his shop, Paul and his family of ‘market sundriesmen’ are a longstanding East End institution. For over four generations, the Gardner’s have been servicing scales, stocking bags
In 1962, a reporter with the New York Post got a tip that screen goddess of the 1940s, Veronica Lake, was working as a barmaid in the lobby of the Martha Washington Hotel, a low rent boarding house in Midtown Manhattan. Using the name Connie de Toth, she said she enjoyed her job because “I
Joyce Bryant in one of Zelda’s designs. Image: Carl Van Vechten Not a month seems to go by without a new cultural insensitivity courtesy of the biggest names in fashion. The good news is, we’re finally entering an era that just doesn’t let it slide. As brands begin to learn from their mistakes and respond
François ‘Féral’ Benga glances at us from black-and-white photographs, immortalised in a sculptural pose, large soulful eyes turned skywards as if to say, I am indeed a celestial creature. Hard to believe, but this lithe of limb and cacao-butter-sleek heavenly vision of a man was in fact an earthling from Dakar, Senegal, who used his
According to popular legend, there was once a female Pope – Pope Joan, who reigned for two years between 855 and 857 before coming to a very sticky end. If you’ve never heard of her, it’s hardly surprising as her existence has been questioned for centuries and her name wiped from official history. It seems
© Robert Doisneau If you were living in Paris during the years that followed World War II and liked to party, you’d better have known Boris Vian. In 1950, he wrote the original guidebook to bohemian Paris and pioneered a movement which brought back the city’s “joie de vivre” that had been lost during the German occupation. Along with Jean Paul-Sartre and Simone
Django Reinhardt was a legendary jazz musician and considered by some the greatest guitarist who ever lived, even more so when you find out he did it all with two fingers. He began as a nomadic busker before becoming a virtuoso and then a romanticised Parisian sepia memory, who still calls out in rolling arpeggios
Portrait of Renée Vivien by Otto Wegener circa. 1900 Picture Paris at the turn of the 20th century: a city drenched in absinthe, artistic ambition, and outrageous fashion choices. Amid the bohemian splendor of the Belle Époque, a woman named Renée Vivien, a Brit in Paris, emerged as a poetic powerhouse and an icon of
