Photo Courtesy of Manuela S. Zoninsein

Shanghai has long been known as China’s most progressive city. During the Roaring Twenties, local fashion, architecture and nightlife fully embraced cosmopolitan ideals, including jazz music, Art Deco design and looser social mores. At the height of the Second World War Europe’s Jewish refugees found a new home here, in the only city in the world that didn’t require a passport for entry. And while the rest of China was still crawling out from under Communism’s gray blanket, Shanghai’s business-savvy denizens were bounding forward, establishing a stock exchange, building thriving local markets, and creating a capitalist-oriented culture.

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Peter McGough and his partner in art David McDermott mark the beginning of the modern world at the outbreak of the First World War, and they’re having nothing to do with any of it. Their dedication to the past is something more than just a retro aesthetic or a backward-looking worldview; it’s somewhere between a lifelong piece of performance art, and a fully realized, semi-private alternative universe. Find out more about its points of intersection with the 21st century at Revel in New York.

Photo of the Crosby Street Hotel

By which we mean, what is it about hotels, anyway? On a physical level they’re simply there to keep the rain off you while you sleep. But you wouldn’t spend ten years maintaining a website devoted to unique and extraordinary tarps, tents and bus shelters. What is it about hotels that makes our obsession seem relatively understandable by comparison?

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