17 Rare and Fascinating Black and White Photos of Youthful Hollywood Star Audrey Hepburn Exploring London's Parks in 1950

During the spring of 1950, Hepburn was relatively unknown to the world. She didn’t become globally famous until she was 24, with the starring role in movie Roman Holiday.

These rare, fascinating pictures show Hepburn three years earlier, on the cusp of super-stardom. They were taken by Picture Post magazine photographer Bert Hardy when she worked as a chorus girl for production Sauce Piquante in London’s West End.

Hardy shot them in London’s Kew Gardens and Richmond Park for a feature called "We Take A Girl To Look For Spring". The images reveal how, even at this early age, Hepburn had true star quality, with seductive looks and a magnetic, coquettish personality.

This Is What Christmas Looked Like in the 1920s

The 1920s ushered in significant changes in American life. They were years when most Americans acquired their first radios and automobiles, and achieved the highest standard of living in the nation's history.

The celebration of the Christmas holiday in the 1920s changed as well. The first national Christmas tree originated during the administration of President Calvin Coolidge. This sixty-foot balsam fir was lit in an impressive ceremony in 1923. Cotton ornaments, inexpensive and unbreakable, were at the peak of their popularity. By the late 1920s, however, spectacular glass ornaments were being imported from Germany. The popular image of Santa Claus, originally created by German-American cartoonist Thomas Nast, was standardized by advertisers in the 1920s.

This rare vintage footage below shows what Christmas looked like in the 1920s.

Yuri Gagarin: The First Man in Space – 60 Old Everyday Photos of the Soviet Hero in the 1960s

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (1934 – 1968) was a Russian Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.

Gagarin became an international celebrity, and was awarded many medals and titles, including Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation's highest honour. Vostok 1 marked his only spaceflight, but he served as backup crew to the Soyuz 1 mission (which ended in a fatal crash). Gagarin later became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow, which was later named after him.

Gagarin died in 1968 when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting crashed. The Yuri Gagarin Medal is awarded in his honor.

Although to be a famous person, he also had a normal life with friends and his family. These old photos captured lovely everyday moments of Gagarin in the 1960s.

Summer rain, Moscow, ca. 1960s

Flapper Fashion – 49 Incredible Colorized Postcards of Cool Girls in Swimsuits during the 1920s

The 1920s was marked by the strong breakthrough of fashion, especially for women, and bathing suits were also among them. There were swimsuits made of wool, and they also became shorter. These made women easier to swim, but also showed off more of their curves.

There were objections, and even the beach polices who patrolled the area with measuring tape in hand to measure the distance between the bottom of a woman's bathing suit and her knee. But briefly, this era was beginning days to bring the boom of fashion onwards.

Here below is a collection of colorized vintage photos that shows young girls in their swimsuits during the 1920s.

Cool kids at the fountain in Wicker Park, Chicago, 1947

10 Icons That Defined the ’80s Fashion, the Decade With All the Style Statements

The 1980s birthed more fashion icons than any other decade. It was one of the most experimental periods in fashion history, with enduring style icons from Princess Diana to Madonna, Joan Collins to Boy George. Clothes were used to define personalities and make big statements. Shoulders were padded up to your ears courtesy of Lady Diana and the Dynasty cast. Meanwhile Boy George and the Blitz club crew were giving peacock punk a whirl.

With electro foil fabrics and power shoulders dominating, we’re taking a look back at the people who started the trends in the first place...

1. Madonna

There was nothing quite like Madonna in the eighties

Her Madge-sty burst onto the pop scene in 1983, working haute scrunchies, leathers and tutus like we’d never seen before. We fell in love (naturally) and the queen of pop reigned on for the rest of the decade, breaking style boundaries with her incredible physique and conical bras.


2. Lady Diana Spencer

Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles on their wedding day

It’s silly of us to even try to sum up Princess Diana’s impact on fashion and culture in one short paragraph, but if we had to, we would say this: she was the trendsetter of a generation, a champion of the power shoulder and that so 80s wedding dress has literally gone down as one of the biggest in history.


3. Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson in Thriller

This jacket is exactly what the ’80s were all about. Shall we call it eye-catching? The power jacket became a Michael Jackson style signature and one of the most copied cuts of the decade. The iconic piece went on to sell for $1.8million at auction in 2011, described by its new owner as ‘the greatest piece of rock memorabilia ever’.


4. Boy George

Boy George rocking his fluid fashion in the eighties

The leader of London’s peacock punks, Boy George saw 1980s fashion as art. With his gang of ‘Blitz kids’ including Leigh Bowery and Stephen Jones, he turned the club scene into a colorful catwalk, dressing as though their lives depended on it and partying so hard it made headlines. The only styling rule for this lot? Anything goes.


5. Joan Collins

Joan Collins in her Dynasty days

Ahhh Joan Collins. The queen of ’80s TV show Dynasty inspired thousands of big hair ‘dos and heavy make-up statements throughout the decade. Her character, the soap’s villain Alexis Colby, had a wardrobe of puff shoulder dresses and trophy jackets that was so bad, it was so so good.