The paranja was a Central Asian covering once common among women in cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand. A long robe was worn over the head rather than the arms, leaving its empty sleeves hanging down the back. The face disappeared behind a separate screen woven from black horsehair.
The Michelotti Shellette was a tiny beach car commissioned by yacht designer Philip Schell and introduced in 1968. Giovanni Michelotti removed the doors from a Fiat 850, cut its sides low and furnished the interior with wicker seats, wood trim and an entirely wicker-covered dashboard. A canvas canopy provided approximately as much protection as Mediterranean owners expected to need. Roughly eighty were made, often as land tenders carried aboard yachts. Aristotle Onassis ordered an automatic version whose removable wicker glovebox could also serve as a breadbasket. The Shellette was designed for the narrow distance between a marina and lunch.
The Fiat 500 Jolly was a beach car created by Italian coachbuilder Ghia in the late 1950s. A standard Fiat arrived at the workshop and left without its doors, roof, side windows or conventional seats. In their place were wicker chairs and a striped fabric canopy, often finished with decorative fringe. Built for resorts, golf courses and wealthy yacht owners, the Jolly was small enough to be lifted aboard and unloaded at the next Mediterranean port.
Pen & Pixel was a Houston design studio that gave Southern rap its preferred reality: one in which everything was chrome, flaming, diamond-covered and slightly larger than Earth. Founded by brothers Shawn and Aaron Brauch in 1992, the studio produced thousands of album covers for labels including No Limit and Cash Money.
SLABs are heavily customized cars that emerged from Houston’s Black neighbourhoods in the 1980s. The name is often expanded as “Slow, Loud and Bangin’,” which also serves as instructions. Usually built from large American sedans, they feature candy paint, whitewall tyres, elaborate trunks and wire wheels called swangas, whose spokes extend sideways into traffic.
The Dornier Do X was a three-storey flying boat built in 1929, then the largest aircraft in the world. Its twelve engines sat in pairs above the wing and were controlled by an engineer, who received instructions from the pilots through a ship-style engine telegraph. Inside were sleeping berths, a dining room and a lounge. On one demonstration flight it carried 169 people, including nine stowaways, setting a record that lasted twenty years. The Do X later flew from Germany to New York, though fires, repairs and repeated stops stretched the journey to nearly ten months. It crossed the Atlantic successfully, provided nobody was in a hurry.
The Bennie Railplane was a propeller-driven train suspended above an ordinary railway. Scottish inventor George Bennie imagined fast passengers travelling overhead while slow freight continued underneath. In 1930, he demonstrated a single Art Deco carriage on a 130-metre track near Glasgow, propelled by enormous blades at either end. Bennie claimed a full-sized system could reach 120 miles per hour, and proposed routes across Britain and beyond. None found funding. He went bankrupt in 1937, and his only Railplane remained beside the tracks until it was scrapped in 1956. For twenty-six years, the future rusted in a field.
The Codex Rotundus is a late-15th-century Book of Hours whose parchment pages and cover were cut into circles just 9.3 centimetres across. Its 266 pages contain prayers in Latin and French, three full-page miniatures and thirty illustrated initials.
Scraper bikes are ordinary bicycles transformed with brightly coloured tape, foil and paint, usually arranged in geometric patterns across the wheels. The style emerged in East Oakland in the mid-2000s.
Introduced in 1946, the Dodge Power Wagon was the first mass-produced four-wheel-drive medium-duty truck offered by a major American manufacturer. Derived from Dodge’s wartime vehicles, it retained their flat fenders, upright cab and general expectation that the bridge ahead might be missing.