The Art of Making Things Up (and Why It Matters)

Once one of the world’s largest and most beautiful department stores, today hiding inside a Parisian office building

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s to listen to the muse – she usually has the juiciest details behind some of history’s most iconic artworks and artists. Today, we travel to the gauzy, sun-dappled world of the romantic pre-Raphaelite painters and zoom in on their unsung queen, “Ophelia” in that iconic painting. It turns out, she was incarnated by a real woman, Miss Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddal, better known as the “supermodel” of the pre-Raphaelites, lesser known as an important and influential artist herself, and a poet too. Her story is just as heroic and haunting as that of the tragic Shakespearean icon she posed as for painter John Everett Millais in 1851 at the age of 23. It’s a story that gives us messy romance, obsession, and even a few ghost stories…

At the foot of Montmartre under a heavy wrought-iron bridge that skims the tips of blackened mausoleums, forgotten souls are spending their after lives in perpetual darkness– not exactly what they might have had in mind when they reserved the best plots in the house for their final curtain call…

Once a month, our Left Bank boutique transforms into the "Paris Writers & Readers Club", a creative candlelit haven after hours for writers and readers to share ideas, readings, and the simple joy of human connection over a glass of wine. For each salon, Nessy invites a special guest author to lead the salon with a reading and answer questions about their work, their process and experience as a writer. Find more information about joining here. One of our members happened to be Éleonore, head of the storied shirtmaker founded in 1968. Figaret has dressed generations of Parisians in shirts that have become a wardrobe staple, and the unoffical uniform of countless writers; synonyms with timeless styles, tailored for life and cut by culture. Over many cups of coffee we discovered how perfectly our worlds fit together. Out of that connection our capsule collection was born. Each piece realised in Figaret's irreproachable quality and fit carries the "Paris Writers & Readers Club" emblem, a salute to the kindred spirits who share our creative spark.

I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, so if you’re reluctant to step inside the world of 19th century junkies, I suggest you close the door and choose something a little lighter and brighter from our menu. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here myself, stockpiling antique photographs that have survived from the Opium Age and ended up on the internet. In my years of hunting and gathering in the far corners of the web, I’ve always been stopped in my tracks by these images because they seem like such rare and almost unreal insights into late 19th century society.

French artist Celine Verney works professionally as a prosthetics artist, creating pieces for museums and television. Alongside that highly specialized practice, she produces these wonderfully unexpected sculptural works as a passion project, made exclusively for us. Her series of sculpted bottoms was inspired by a group of antique erotic plaques Nessy discovered at a flea market. Verney reinterprets their cheeky, centuries-old spirit as tactile contemporary objects: intimate, humorous, and just a little surreal.

Gather ‘round, cinema enthusiasts, because it’s time to tip our top hats to one of vintage Hollywood’s most dazzling visionaries: Busby Berkeley. A man whose name conjures up images of synchronised swimmers, overhead shots of geometric dancers, and the kind of glitzy, glittery choreography that could put a magpie into cardiac arrest. Berkeley didn’t just direct; he orchestrated, and in doing so, he transformed the way we experience musicals on the silver screen. Let’s dive into his kaleidoscopic world—sparkles, synchronised legs, and all.

In pursuit of the African American story abroad, we often look to 1920s Paris, where jazz was first introduced to the French and Black culture was embraced with open arms. It's a more familiar story than the one about Soviet Russia opening its doors to thousands of Black Americans in the 20th century, where they found social freedom, acceptance and economic opportunity. Under Stalin's de facto policy of ethnic cleansing, it’s hard to picture the USSR as any kind of paradise for persecuted minorities, but in stark contrast to the trauma and systemic oppression that people of colour had long-faced in the many parts of the western world, Mother Russia poised itself as a beacon of equality, ahead of the historical curve. Turning to a lesser-known chapter of American ex-pat tales, this is the murky, hidden history of an unlikely regime that despite its pernicious past, also tried to make it “great to be Black in the USSR”...

The possible survival and escape of the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, was one of most captivating and romantic mysteries of the 20th century. The youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, was assumed to have been tragically murdered along with her parents and siblings by communist revolutionaries in 1918, when they were lured by their captors into the basement of their own home, and executed by firing squad.

Explore America’s small towns, and you might be lucky to stumble across a peculiarly shaped house that stands out from its surrounding neighbours by virtue of having eight facades. Back in the middle of the 19th century, there were once thousands of these ‘octagonal’ houses all over America when they were the height of fashion, but today only a handful remain. These unusual eight sided homes are the surviving relics of an 1850s architectural craze dreamt up by one man.

Maud Allan– beauty of the Belle Epoque, concert pianist-turned actress, dancer and choreographer and … sex-crazed lesbian spy for German wartime conspirators? Suddenly, my morning research into an Edwardian postcard just got a lot more interesting…

A delightfully morbid little memento, handmade in-house by Nessy for the good-humoured collector with a taste for the unusual. Featuring a tiny velvet bow and a cheeky nod to French royal history, this wonderfully eccentric curiosity is encased in an antique Napoleon III frame, giving it all the charm of a treasured relic from another century.

When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and produce award-winning albums and run his own record label. He would star in, write and direct his own films. People would flock to see this titan of soul, fans adored him, people wanted to be him. Think James Brown meets Quincy Jones. And between 1968 and 1977 Mike would achieve all of this, only he’d do it all with his own wondrous imagination.