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The Années Folles in Paris — a time for jazz, literature of the Lost Generation, and a little-known fetish fashion boom. Spearheaded by a husband and wife team largely forgotten by history, ...
“The Seine is a great place to have a crisis, since it clearly embodies the strength and the uncertainty, the beauty and the challenge of Paris itself.” – James Baldwin The Seine river fl...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/06/08/drama-on-the-seine-a-compendium-of-watery-turmoil/
Remember that beautiful Parisian village featured in the Oscar-winning 1950s short film The Red Balloon? Well we’re sorry to report that it was almost entirely levelled by the French governme...
Walking through Paris, as a tourist or a local, it’s hard to miss the sense of harmony that the city exudes. The standardized buildings, the parks, the long angular streets that seem to alway...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/09/20/when-they-say-haussmanns-paris-what-do-they-mean/
In many ways, the history of the Louvre is the history of France, from the era of monarchs and the temples they built to their power to the radical ambitions of the French Revolution and Paris ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/09/02/pariss-missing-palace-and-the-making-of-the-louvre/
Forget the Olympics. Forget PT Barnum’s legendary spectacles. It was Paris, in my opinion that wins the prize for putting on the greatest show on Earth. Photographs of the Universal Expositio...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2018/04/10/when-paris-built-the-greatest-show-on-earth/
Parisians often talk about the great travesty that was the loss of Les Halles, a legendary food market in the heart of Paris, fondly referred to as “the belly of Paris”, a seemingly indestr...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/10/05/searching-for-a-lost-wine-village-in-paris/
Last night I was standing at the counter of our local café on Boulevard Saint Germain, finishing off a last glass of wine after work before heading home for the evening, when I noticed somet...
I had been curious about what was behind the door of No. 6 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in Saint Germain for quite a while before I decided to Google it, half expecting to be disappointed by news that it...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/10/13/inside-a-time-capsule-fencing-club-of-paris/
The Montmartre annual wine harvest has been a festive Parisian tradition since 1934, but we’ve come across some photographs from the 1950s that reveal a time in the vineyard’s history w...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/01/27/can-can-dancing-in-the-paris-vineyard/
“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...
La Seine, immortalized by artists and adored by lovers dangling their feet over the quay, harbours a dark secret. Under the fifth and thirteenth arrondissements grumbles la Bièvre, the Seine�...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/12/09/hunting-the-lost-river-of-paris/
I came across these curious photographs from the French National library, dated to 1932 and labelled, “École d’aviation sur le toit des Galeries Lafayette” – Aviation school on the ...
If you ever got around to watching Life of Pi you might recall the hero of the film, a young Indian boy living in French colonial India, was ironically named ‘Piscine Molitor Patel’, aft...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/06/03/the-ruins-of-piscine-molitor-rise-again/
In Paris, every first Wednesday of the month at noon, without fail you can hear the eerie wail of an air raid siren from wherever you are in the city. They’ve been going since pre-World War I...
Paris and New York: both have islands, both have Statues of Liberty, crazy people on the metro, and unbeknownst to most, they both have parks in the sky. Until a little while ago, I was under t...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2012/07/06/paris-secret-park-in-the-sky-the-original-high-line/