Born in 1895 to former slaves, Hattie McDaniel would go to become the first African American to receive an Academy Award. But she didn’t just break boundaries in film. Through her radio show The Beaulah Show, She also became the first black woman to sing on the radio in the U.S. McDaniel has two stars […]
Some see beauty in the broken places…others make beauty from the broken places. There’s a famous technique in Japan known as kintsugi. Translated, it means “golden joinery” or “to patch with gold”. It’s a technique that stitches together broken pottery using gold applied with laquer on the broken places, enhancing the breaks. The technique is also […]
There’s a type of woman in this world you meet only occasionally. She’s the type you can’t remember what she looks like. How can that be? In a society that lives and breathes off the measurement of beauty, how can you not know if someone is attractive or not? How can you not remember if […]
One of the most important female intellectuals of modern times, Simone de Beauvoir was a writer, existentialist, philosopher, feminist, political activist and social theorist. She lived a life often scandalous in its nature but dared to speak the unspoken and be unapologetically herself. Born in Paris in 1908, she was profoundly religious as a child. […]
There’s a lot to say about Diana Vreeland. The former editor-in-chief of Vogue from 1963 until 1971, founder of the infamous Met Costume Ball, and style icon for women to this day, she changed the idea of fashion, celebrating the “flaws” and “faults” of women. Before Vogue, she got her first job in the industry at […]
Anaïs Nin was a Cuban-born essayist and memoirist from Paris. Born in 1903, she spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She wrote journals (which span more than 60 years, beginning when she was 11 years old and ending shortly […]
Erica Jong is an American novelist and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Fear of Flying is a quasi-memoir following the […]
Unless you were in the industry or in the fashion know, it’s unlikely Grace Coddington would have been a name you recognized pre 2009. But this accidental celebrity has always been in the forefront of fashion. You just never noticed. As a young girl stuck in Anglesey, Wales, the arrival of her copy of Vogue […]