Messy Nessy Chic » People / Icons / Muses

His name is synonymous with the art of mime, a performer whose silent expressions spoke volumes. But beyond his pale-faced persona and invisible walls lies a story of remarkable bravery and her...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/06/21/silent-saviour-how-marcel-marceau-used-mime-to-save-lives-in-wwii/

Between 1900 and 1930, a poor and destitute seed pedlar took more than five thousand photographs of daily life in an isolated valley of the Italian-speaking Swiss territory to the south of th...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/06/14/memories-of-a-lost-valley-5000-photographs-discovered-in-an-attic/

Picture this: it’s the early 1900s, the silent film era is still just finding its feet, and movie stars are as mythical as unicorns. Enter Florence Lawrence, the “first movie star”, who i...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/05/30/how-did-we-forget-the-first-movie-star/

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 ...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/05/27/artist-of-the-week-she-was-a-victorian-rockstar-photographer/

Picture Paris at the turn of the 20th century: a city drenched in absinthe, artistic ambition, and outrageous fashion choices. Amid the bohemian splendor of the Belle Époque, a woman named Ren...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/05/23/she-was-the-sapphic-sensation-of-belle-epoque-paris/

Agnès Varda throughout her career was seen as belonging to the older generation. A pioneering photographer, writer, filmmaker and artist, at the beginning of her career and at barely 30 years ...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2023/11/30/how-to-introduce-agnes-varda-to-the-next-generation/

In the decades since she jumped from a lower Manhattan high rise window at the age of 22, Francesca Woodman’s work has been rediscovered, revered and taught as gospel to photography students ...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/09/08/the-ghost-of-francesca-woodman/

It all started with this those three girls on a rock in 1922, putting my beach snaps to shame. Why is it, that with all the technology we have at our disposal to document every moment of our ho...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/08/22/your-summer-photo-goals-as-demonstrated-by-the-1920s-morris-mermaids/

For a few Spring months in 1954, a melancholy Picasso found himself enraptured by 19-year-old Sylvette David. Of all the muses who bookmarked his life — and there were many — she’s fallen...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/08/21/what-happened-to-picassos-forgotten-teenage-muse/

Every summer we run into the same problem: too many amazing festivals, too little time. Then we caught wind of the long lost Delphic Festivals, which makes every concert we’ve ever been to pa...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/07/24/never-again-would-there-be-a-toga-party-like-the-lost-1920s-delphic-festival/

The only place more frequented than the Eiffel Tower, according to 19th century Parisians, was the exalted mattress of the Valtesse de la Bigne. Her story is the quintessential rags-to-riches t...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/03/07/the-courtesan-all-of-paris-fell-for/

She wasn’t the most likeable character of her time. Once rumoured to be the most beautiful woman in 19th century Europe, a queen of both style and drama; model, mistress, self-appointed muse,...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/09/07/the-selfie-obsessed-countess-of-vanity/

If you’ve stepped foot in France you have probably seen her, the beautiful woman wearing the odd hat who is adorned on French euro coins, stamps, wine bottles, and many other places.  This...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/07/14/meet-marianne-and-the-many-faces-of-the-french-republic/

“Things go better with Coke”? Not the French apparently– at least, not when Coca Cola first officially began marketing the drink here in 1950. According to these photographs I came acro...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/09/04/the-day-coco-cola-came-to-france-and-how-parisians-reacted/

My favourite kind of people are one the ones who don’t give a damn. So while the rest of the media fusses over the red carpet posers at the Cannes film festival, getting their seasonal fix...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/15/20-people-not-giving-a-damn-about-the-red-carpet-at-cannes/

They met in Paris in 1932. Both already married, American novelist Henry Miller and Franco-American diarist Anaïs Nin began an intense love affair leading to some of the most passionate lette...

https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/03/28/now-that-is-how-you-write-a-love-letter/