For your Easter weekend dreamscapes

Your weekly distractions are served…

These rare vintage guillotine earrings come from a sleeping stock of collectible pendants and we've added gold plated closures to the set. The pendants themselves are gold-plated copper made in the later half of the 20th century.  One of the most unusual stories to come out of post-revolutionary France must be the bals des victimes, or victim’s balls. Writings and records from the era suggest that an unusual subculture of society balls emerged as orphaned aristocrats began to see the return of their confiscated fortunes. [MessyNessyChic]

For the amount we talk about going down the rabbit holes here on Messy Nessy Chic, there was no way I wasn’t going to obsess over this one. Have you heard about the Caynton Caves? 

I found another thing I wish I’d been born a few decades earlier for: vintage wallpaper hunting. Suzanne Lipschutz got there before everyone else. She was the first, the original crazy bohemian lady from New York who scoured the earth, from Paris flea market stalls to hardware stores in small town middle America, in search of forgotten wall coverings that nobody else wanted.

Julia Margaret Cameron revolutionized the world of photography. Known for her dreamy, soft-focus images and dramatic compositions, Cameron was the queen of Victorian portraiture. She was ahead of her time, doing everything differently before it was cool.

“Thomasson: noun \ to-ma-son \ a preserved architectural relic which serves no purpose”. We’ve all come across an example at one time or another– probably didn’t give it too much thought and surely had no idea these random urban oddities actually had a name, let alone an entire movement dedicated to observing them as conceptual art. That’s right, art. People have written books about Thomasson, formed street observation societies to find them (notably in Japan) and even identified a classification system of categories for them. On Instagram, there are over 3,000 posts alone under the Japanese “Tomasson” hashtag: トマソン.  I don’t know about you, but I feel like I just found a trapdoor to another secret level in the game of life. 

Let us take a look inside the classical grandeur and neo-romanticism that flows through the oeuvre of Emilio Terry. A maximalist from the school of more is most definitely more; Terry was an artist, architect, interior decorator, and darling of French society. Parisian born, he would mix in the elite circles of artists and aristocrats, Salvador Dali would immortalize him in oil paint and devotees of his Baroque decorative flair would covet his architectural creations. Widely unknown, and selective about where he bestowed his gift, his clientele would include Prince Rainier III of Monaco, the eccentric millionaire Carlos de Beistegui often referred to as the ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, Stavros Niarchos a billionaire shipping tycoon and the who’s who of the mid 20th century swinging glitterati. Fabulous to those who could afford him and very expensive to those who couldn’t.

If it took you this long to identify one of the most epic genres of art history, welcome to the club. We must have skipped class that day. The aesthetic: a lost civilization – its crumbling and vaguely familiar architectural forms dramatically lit by a sunset backdrop, and in the foreground, a congregation of folks are musing amidst the ruins. That’s called ‘Capriccio‘; a genre introduced in the Renaissance combining the real and the fanciful, juxtaposing familiar elements of classical architecture with fantastical ones; an artist’s vision of a landscape unhindered by historical accuracy or geographical and physical limitations. The artist gets to move temples and pillars, play with perspectives, conjure whimsical skylines and build views that only exist in their imagination. Before AI-generated images were flooding our instagram feeds, prompting us to wonder if such places exists, there was the art of capriccio…

In 1924, a truck accidentally sank into a backlot in Washington DC, opening a sinkhole and revealing a labyrinth of tunnels. People were aghast at what had been found; there was talk of bootleggers and spies that would later make the front page of the Healdsburg Tribune, but no one had any answers. Eventually, a renowned entomologist of The Smithsonian came forward, a Mr. Harrison G. Dyar Jr., who admitted that he had built the tunnel fifteen years earlier and that it was a ‘’hobby of his’’. It had started in 1905, he explained, when he was digging the flowerbeds for his wife and thought, I could just keep going. When Dyar moved to another city, he continued with gusto, improving on his previous efforts with passageways of bricked walls and elaborate carvings and twisted stairwells. Tons of earth were shifted in a herculean solitary effort, and why? Because “some men play golf, I dig tunnels”.

“Saverio Bongiorno had no permanent home and had been living in various midtown hotels. Bongiorno registered at the Edison Hotel on Sunday, with a small beach bag as his only baggage. He was assigned to room 1135 and nothing more was seen or heard of him…James Gerrity, chief house detective of the Hotel Edison, 224 West Forty-Seventh Street…went to room 1135, knocked repeatedly and then decided to enter with his pass key. Just as he started to insert the key, the door swung violently open and Bongiorno confronted him with a .38 calibre pistol in his hand.” This may sound like an excerpt from the hard boiled fiction of crime novelists like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but it is actually an account from the New York Times, January 1935. It gives a tantalising glimpse into the vanished world of one of the great lost professions : the hotel house detective.

At the start of the pandemic, we looked at some people-repelling fashion statements of yore and wondered whether the surreal measures of a socially-distanced world might impact the future of fashion. Fast-forward several months and an article in the New Yorker this week has declared our current fashion mood as the “the Slob-Chic Style of the Coronavirus Pandemic”, but here at MessyNessyChic, our outlook is decidedly more optimistic. Throughout the lockdowns, we saw ourselves and those around us get seriously creative. We finally had time to discover new hobbies and skills, while a shift in consciousness has seen consumers make the switch away from fast fashion to more ethical clothing options. And so with that in mind, we’re forecasting (or at least hoping for) a revival of DIY customisable fashion – the idea of reinventing your classic white shirt time and again with creative accessories, trims, embroidery, brooches and other embellishments. And we found the perfect inspiration, where else, but in the archives of fashion…

A rare Art Nouveau beauty, embossed with Paris’s greatest icon: the Eiffel Tower.  Perfect as a collectible Paris souvenir, a small trinket dish, or a decorative accent for a shelf, desk, or coffee table.