Essay · Fashion & Culture The Empress of the Imaginary Diana Vreeland did not edit magazines. She edited reality — selecting from the available world only those elements that met her standard of vividness, discarding the rest without apology, and presenting the result with a conviction so absolute that generations of readers, photographers, and designersContinue reading “Diana Vreeland”
Category Archives: Blog
Luigi Moretti
Essay · Architecture & History The Architect Who Could Not Be Placed Luigi Moretti was a Fascist, a theorist, a sensualist, a fraudster, and one of the most formally inventive architects of the twentieth century. That these facts belong to the same man, the same career, the same restless and finally tragic intelligence, is theContinue reading “Luigi Moretti”
Filth Is My Politics: John Waters, Divine, and the Cinema of Glorious Bad Taste
For six decades, the Pope of Trash has been making films that Baltimore’s respectable classes would prefer not to exist. In doing so, he and his muse created something that outlasted respectability entirely — a body of work that is simultaneously the most offensive and the most loving in American cinema. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Filth Is My Politics: John Waters, Divine, and the Cinema of Glorious Bad Taste”
Anna Boghiguian
Essay · Art & Lives The Nomad Who Carries History in a Suitcase Anna Boghiguian has no fixed address and no fixed medium. What she has, instead, is an inexhaustible appetite for the world’s buried histories — of trade, of empire, of displacement, of the bodies that paid the price for other people’s prosperity —Continue reading “Anna Boghiguian”
Fritz Wotruba
Essay · Art & Architecture The Man Who Built the Human Figure from Rubble Fritz Wotruba spent his life doing one thing: finding the body inside the block. That this task consumed him entirely, across five decades of exile, return, and monumental ambition, tells us something important about what sculpture is for — and aboutContinue reading “Fritz Wotruba”
Katharine Hepburn
Essay · Arts & Lives A House That Made Her Possible Katharine Hepburn did not invent herself. She was manufactured — lovingly, rigorously, sometimes mercilessly — by two of the most unusual parents that Progressive Era New England ever produced, and she spent the rest of her life living out the experiment they designed. ByContinue reading “Katharine Hepburn”
Mohammed Ali
Essay · Sport & Culture The Man Who Refusedto Be Only a Fighter Mohammed Ali did not merely win bouts. He waged a campaign — against racism, against empire, against the very idea that a Black man in America must keep his mouth shut and take his beating gracefully. By Bergotte There is a photograph,Continue reading “Mohammed Ali”
Cher and the Art of Outlasting America
Cher has lasted so long, and in so many forms, that she can seem less like an entertainer than like a permanent feature of the culture itself. She belongs to that tiny class of figures who have ceased to be merely famous and become symbolic: instantly recognisable, endlessly referential, somehow both singular and omnipresent. Singer,Continue reading “Cher and the Art of Outlasting America”
Alan Parker and the Brutal Energy of Modern British Cinema
Alan Parker belongs to that increasingly rare category of British director whose work was at once popular, ambitious and unmistakably personal. He was not a miniaturist, nor a specialist, nor a filmmaker content to remain within one tonal register. He moved restlessly between genres and scales: from the stylised bravado of Bugsy Malone to theContinue reading “Alan Parker and the Brutal Energy of Modern British Cinema”
Where the River Bends: Memphis and the Music That Changed the World
It is the most productive square mile in American cultural history. A city of grief and genius, of violence and transcendence, built on cotton and the blues and the unsettled accounts of race — Memphis made the modern world’s soundtrack and has never quite recovered from the effort. By Bergotte Begin with the geography, becauseContinue reading “Where the River Bends: Memphis and the Music That Changed the World”
My World of Interiors 