For months now, I’ve had a bunch of images saved in a Google Doc dedicated to potential Pictorial odds and ends. It’s a pile of stock photos of women doing aerobics, circa the early 1990s. Every couple of weeks, I look at these photos, hoping inspiration will strike and I’ll figure out what to say about them. But I’m…
If you’ve ever wanted to own the mortal remains of a famous 20th century author, here is perhaps your only shot: Truman Capote’s ashes are going up for auction in September. You’ll just have to beat the Addams Family to the punch.
Mae West was born on this day, in Brooklyn, in 1893. This is a great excuse to take yourself out somewhere saucy, throw a fur stole across your shoulder—faux is fine—and raise a glass of champagne.
It’s the end of an era: T.G.I. Friday’s is beginning to chuck its antique/junktique/faketique aesthetic for a cleaner, modern look (that evokes an IHOP). They’re not alone: Ruby Tuesday decluttered and upscaled in 2007. It’s all incredibly ironic, considering the popularity of “Brooklyn” style reclaimed wood, pseudo…
What you are seeing is not some fancy theater or place of worship, but rather the Crossness Pumping Station, part of London’s ambitious Victorian-era sewer system, which is now open to visitors. Only the finest, most ornate repositories for the turds of the Victorians!
Look at these two. Get a room, already!
After some quality time in various photo archives, I’d like to make an observation about the history of the Olympic Games. And that is, fashion-wise, it can be divided into six separate eras.
Fun fact: While writing her memoir in the office of the publisher Knopf, Lauren Bacall occasionally brought donuts for everybody. Could you eat a donut in front of Lauren Bacall? I couldn’t.
In the ‘90s, Jason Rail was the hair and makeup artist for cult classics like The Doom Generation, where he designed Rose McGowan’s iconic dark red bob (which he insists is definitely not a Pulp Fiction rip-off). He recently started Instagramming some of the incredible polaroids he took of all our ‘90s icons.
Perhaps you already knew this, but just in case you didn’t, it feels important to note that the Opening Ceremony of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which took place in L.A., featured a dude zipping around the candy-colored auditorium in a jet pack. Hell yeah, baby—the future!
Marion Duckworth Smith sometimes wears a gold pin on her blouse that reads “Lady Legacy.” This accessory, which was given to her in 2004 by Henry Stern of New York City’s Historic House Trust, is the first clue that she knows something about what can be preserved over time and what fades away.
Consider—if you will—the fate of the trend, which is to fall dramatically from grace. For instance, these “model” interiors from the 1970s. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Gloria DeHaven, an MGM player who appeared in several of the studio’s midcentury musicals alongside stars including Fred Astaire, has died at 91. Her bio and long list of screen credits suggest she was a real trooper or, as one obit puts it, “a stalwart of show business.”
The first at-home pregnant test wasn’t widely available in the United States until 1977. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. A woman named Margaret Crane was plugging away at the problem a decade earlier, despite resistance at every turn.
A little throwback to the height of the Clinton-era culture wars for your Wednesday morning: In 1995, Wal-Mart pulled t-shirts featuring a Dennis the Menace character declaring “Someday a woman will be PRESIDENT!” from one of its stores because somebody thought it was “offensive.”
Youree Dell Harris, known to many as Miss Cleo, died Tuesday morning at age 53 in Palm Beach County, FL. TMZ reports she was “originally diagnosed with colon cancer,” but that it spread to her liver and lungs. She was with friends and family when she died.
Let us hop in our culinary time machine and set a course for the Roman Empire. FYI, the favored condiment of that mighty ancient culture was a sauce called garum, and it was made from fermented fish guts and blood—mackerel was especially popular—plus herbs and salt. Yum, yum!
Singer Marni Nixon has died at the age of 86. She didn’t get the marquee credit, but the singing in some of the most famous musicals of the twentieth century was actually her work.
It’s hot. It’s so god-almighty hot that it’s tempting to follow the example of these women who at some point in September 1961 decided to beat the heat by dragging a Central Park bench right into an available pond.
The last (known) maker of VCRs—that’s videocassette recorders, for the children out there—is throwing in the towel. Here ends an era. Not that anybody could ever program the goddamn things even at the height of their popularity, anyway.
