I am getting to this a little late (everyone else probably saw this already over a month ago) but in addition to this blog being a place to share things with you, it’s also a memory book of things for me. And this collection is worth remembering!
I have been carrying The Transylvania Chronicles around with me since ABODI released it earlier this year — not unlike the Castle Bag itself, which is to say: a vessel for haunted imaginations, strange dreams, and whatever it is that makes certain people feel more at home in the dark.
Led by creative director Dora Abodi, the brand has always operated less like a fashion house and more like what she herself calls “a boundless imaginary republic,” and this collection is exactly that, governed by ancient creatures, Transylvanian mythology, and a very particular, very beautiful kind of strangeness.
The photographs, shot by Szilveszter Makó with an art direction that sits somewhere between studio portraiture and mythological documentation, are the kind of images you might find in a weird storybook, high on a shelf, hidden from young little hands. Model Ursula Wångander shapeshifts through a gallery of dark archetypes — Elisabeth Báthory, Dracula, spectral ghosts, the Cat Mermaid, the elusive water vila — each one presented as if suspended within a painting rather than a photograph. The overhead shots, especially those of models arranged against illustrated sets like figures in a darkly illuminated manuscript, create an incredible, uncanny paper-doll effect.
The garments themselves are extraordinary. The Chronicles dress is ornamented with Abodi’s own paintings, a non-linear visual diary of childhood memories, myths, and history drifting through enchanted forests, blue-painted Secler houses, folk dancers, wandering ghosts, the vampire prince, the blood queen — an entire mythology compressed into fabric.
The Landscape of Dreams coat is made from hand-woven antique hemp, fully hand-painted, then patchworked and three-dimensionally applied with figures and shapes through what Abodi describes as a long meditative painting process followed by intuitive assembly. It is explicitly, emphatically impossible to recreate.The Bokály Dress reimagines the iconic ceramic vessel of the Székelys of Transylvania, a piece whose graceful curves and richly ornamented surfaces carry centuries of folk tradition, into living woven form. And there is antique broderie anglaise lace described in the collection notes as “delicate as breath, yet carrying centuries within its threads,” the collection’s mythology embedding itself even into the perforations of the fabric: it is said that Elisabeth Báthory once stared into such lace and saw the shadow of her own destiny unfolding in its fragile tracery.
Speaking of Báthory — she is a central figure here, reinterpreted not as monster but as symbol of demonized female power, a woman feared for her refusal to submit. And the collection’s notes offer one of the more quietly devastating framings of her story: Báthory was afraid of mirrors. They reflected reality, and the slow vanishing of youth. Her face had become a diary of the past, and she could not bear it.
Meanwhile, across the collection’s mythology, Dracula was magnetic with dark authority, younger, stronger, at the peak of his power, and yet could never enjoy his own face, because mirrors showed him nothing. We are all lured by what we don’t have, and blind to what we do. I had to think on that for a while, and when it finally settled, it felt less like a moral and more like a key, the thing that unlocks both of them at once, their particular hungers, their particular blindnesses.
Then there is Artefact 2, a padded, scalloped-silhouette oversized jacket, and in the presentation, when it was worn, bats took flight from within its sculptural folds. A soft cavern stitched from memory, opening its wings.
And then there is the Castle Bag!!. A black sculptural bag inspired by Dracula’s Castle, retailing for around €850, which I would kinda maybe consider? I would consider it. One Reddit commenter said they would sell a kidney for it, and I don’t think that’s entirely hyperbolic. It began as a headpiece created with no commercial intention at all, total imaginative freedom, and only became a bag after Jaden Smith wore the original to the Grammys, and it went viral. But for real, the only piece from this collection within actual reach is the Cat Mermaid socks, and at $112 a pair, can buy does not equal should buy. I am choosing to experience this particular desire from a respectful distance!
There is a quote from Abodi that I keep returning to: she describes the ambition of ABODI Transylvania as the establishment of an autonomous and creative domain where her legendary creatures (including myself, she writes) can freely create and feel at home. Including myself. She counts herself among the legendary creatures. It would be easy to call that charming or empowering, but I think it’s something more than either of those.
It’s a delirious collapsing of the distance between maker and myth. She isn’t standing outside the universe she built, directing it from a safe distance… she’s inside it, one of its creatures, subject to the same ancient forces and folklore as Báthory and Dracula and the other Carpathian icons. There’s a kind of radical imaginative humility in that, or maybe the opposite of humility. She made the world, and then she walked into it, and became part of it.
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Once, in another lifetime, I was having a phone conversation. I don’t remember with whom, or what it was about, but I uttered the phrase “…unbeknownst to me.” Just in passing, really, without even thinking about it. Because it was the right word for whatever I was trying to say. It’s just a word that lives in my head, the way certain words do, the kind you’d use whether anyone was listening or not.
Someone was listening, as it turned out. And he wanted to know why I had to “talk like that.”
Like I was showing off. Like “unbeknownst” was something I’d hauled out to perform intelligence at people. I didn’t understand the accusation at the time, it took me years to fully parse what was actually being said, which was not you “think you’re better than everyone” so much as “why can’t you think and talk and act like me.” It wasn’t, I think, insecurity exactly. It felt more like a profound intolerance for anyone operating outside his frequency. I was supposed to be a mirror. Smaller. Simpler. Legible to him.
I was with this person for ten years. I was twenty-four when we met; he was thirty-five. By the time we moved in together I was pushing thirty and he was inching toward forty, which I mention only because the disparity in our ages felt, at the time, like evidence that he knew things I didn’t. That his read on the world — and on me — carried some authority mine didn’t yet. He was paranoid and controlling and could construct an accusation out of thin air and a vocabulary word. He also knew, on some level, exactly what he was. He told me once, with the particular self-satisfaction of a man confessing to something he expects to be forgiven for, that he was leftover meatloaf. His words. He already had a wife, a life, a family, and what I got was whatever was left on the plate at the end of the night. He said this like it was charming. Like self-awareness was the same thing as not doing harm.
What he could not do was meet me where I lived. And rather than acknowledge that gap, he spent years convincing me the gap didn’t exist — or that if it did, I had dug it myself, on purpose, to make him feel small. More than that: he convinced me I was fine with a small life. That I wanted it, actually. That the ceiling he’d put on our world was appropriate to someone like me, because no one would ever love me or understand me the way he did. I was too much and also not enough, and he was the only one willing to take on the specific burden of my particular whateverness. I believed him. For a long time, I genuinely believed him.
Here’s what I think I know now, that I didn’t know at twenty-four: people who are threatened by how you think are perhaps not going to grow into people who aren’t. When someone hears unbeknownst and reads it as a failure to be more like them, the problem is…probably not your word choice.
What it looks like when someone is actually on your level, or what it looks like for me, anyway: you say the weirdest thing that comes into your head, and they catch it. They throw something weirder back. Ývan knows I think I’m better than everyone (I’m not going to pretend otherwise!) and rather than flinching or sulking or demanding to know why I have to talk like that, he makes me even better. This happens multiple times a day, every day, without either of us keeping score or making it mean something about the other person’s worth. There’s no single example I can point to because it’s not a single example; it’s the texture of everything, the whole fabric of how we move through the world together. Either someone delights in how your mind works, or they don’t. I’m not sure there’s much of an in-between that holds.
And this isn’t only a story about a romantic relationship. The same principle applies now to everyone I let close, friends, collaborators, people I gave my time and attention, and best words to. The meatloaf guy was the most extreme version, but he wasn’t the only one operating outside my frequency who I kept making excuses for.
I actually think about that post-telephone call exchange every day. But it was seeing one of those “what advice would you give your younger self?” social media posts that made me try to organize and articulate all of my thoughts about it. So here it is.
Younger me: If They’re Not On Your Level, Don’t Fuck With Them. Your weird heights are the view from which you were always meant to see the world; don’t you dare lower yourself. You are not too much. Do not swallow your words. Do not dim your vocabulary, your curiosity, your particular brand of expansive weird intelligence. Do not accept a half-life with a half-person and call it love. Do not accept leftover meatloaf and do not say thank you for it. Do not make yourself legible to someone who isn’t worth the translation.
At this point in my life I have, I’m glad to say, surrounded myself with people who operate at my frequency, who catch what I throw and throw something stranger back, who make me more myself rather than less. It took longer than it should have. But here we are.
And unbeknownst to that younger, credulous, catastrophically undersold version of myself: she was not, in point of fact, consigned by fate or deficiency to subsist upon the desiccated leavings of someone else’s life. She was owed, and has since received, the whole magnificent, unabridged feast.
Also: I’ll talk however I like, motherfucker. Go die in a fire.
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If you have spent any time in the darker corners of the internet where contemporary artists share their work, you may have already stumbled into Nona Limmen’s world without quite knowing how you got there.
The Amsterdam-based artist has spent years filing dispatches from a mysterious place whose existence remains unconfirmed, a vast kingdom obscurely bordering our own, wrought of shadows and secrets, its towering cliffs and dark caves and veiled inhabitants glimpsed only in the grain and blur her analogue techniques produce. Her photographs arrive like transmissions from memory or dream, specific and sourceless; impossible to recount and equally impossible to forget.
Limmen’s world has a way of finding its people. If you already speak the language of crow-black skies and candlelit staircases, of fog-eaten landscapes and figures who belong to no particular century, her photographs will locate you with an almost uncanny precision.
As it happens, my own gaze tends to linger on portraits and landscapes that produce a specific unease, the shadow amongst summer trees, the figure glimpsed at the edge of a landscape, the beautiful thing with something occluded at its center. Limmen builds entire worlds from exactly this trembling, tenebrous material, and inhabits them with solemn reverence and indefatigable devotion.
Limmen’s visual vocabulary is immediately recognizable. Dusk light, deep and livid. Candlelight guttering against absolute dark. The ash and pewter of deep winter. Gothic spires piercing a roiling dark that resolves, on closer looking, into a thousand wings. Skeletal trees reaching into skies so dramatically violet they read as verdict rather than weather.
Stone and shadow, iron and fog, the overgrown gate with ivy reclaiming its archway, the castle glimpsed through a cloud of birds at twilight. Her settings carry the same weight and intention as any figure she places within them, as present and purposeful, as steeped in the work of the image. You are always, unmistakably, somewhere in Limmen’s midnight country.
Nearly every image Limmen makes is poised at the edge of something. The ghostly figure on the staircase landing, five candles held aloft, neither ascending nor descending, the darkness above and below equally absolute. The dancing figures in an open field beneath a sky gone the color of cold embers, mid-movement, mid-ritual, caught in a moment that feels both ancient and unfinished. The castle swallowed by dusk, its towers readable only as interruptions in the dark, secretive and permanent and sealed.
Her world exists in this suspended state permanently, always on the verge of some disclosure that never quite arrives. The haze and sediment of her darkroom sorcery holds the tension in place, the veil of her process keeping each image at precisely the distance where mystery remains intact.
The figures who move through Limmen’s photographs are not drawn from the sweeter registers of fantasy. Witches bearing torches, wresting the fire from the hands that once burned them. Vampires and succubi baring fangs, wings aloft, their power radiant and hypnotic and terrifyingly gorgeous. The exiled queen. The witch of the wood. The horned figure on the dune, blade in hand, commanding a landscape that receives her without question.
These archetypes have spent centuries as cautionary tales, as monsters, as the one must escape or defeat. In Limmen’s hands they are are feral and free and fully realized. She photographs them the way you would photograph anyone fully at home in their own skin, which is to say, with total and unselfconscious ease. The dark feminine here is simply sovereign. Ancient and absolute.
“When Night Comes” its brooding Gothic towers and swarming bats suspended against a sky of inky damsons, fresh figs on inky velvet, of violet-studded plum, is the image I included in The Art of Darkness, though I had been following Limmen’s work for years before that, summoned to it time and again with the insistence of a sentiment that speaks directly to the parts of my heart that live in the dark.
She has described her work as visual love letters to the night, and I have yet to encounter a more honest or more beautiful accounting of what she makes. Limmen has spent years in devoted correspondence with the dark, and her photographs are the proof of that fidelity: dispatches from a profoundly haunted kingdom that has perhaps begun to dream of her in return.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
I didn’t even know this sweet photo existed until recently, and now it is my favorite thing ever. This is from our teensy tiny wedding four years (but many hair colors!) ago.
Gosh. These two. It took these two weirdos quite a while to find each other, but I am so glad that they finally did.
I realize I’ve been posting little tidbits here on the blog lately, not many long-form pieces. Hopefully, I will get back to that soon! I’ve been a bit overwhelmed and am trying to keep it together, and while sometimes it helps to lose myself in an afternoon of writing, sometimes it is quite literally the very last thing I want to do!
Anyway, I am back from my work-related travels, and obviously, I survived, so now I can breathe again. And no doubt, the ideas, the thinking, the brainstorming, and then the writing about all of those thoughts will follow!
We covered a lot of ground: my strange, sideways relationship with goth subculture, the heavy metal origins of my particular flavor of darkness, how symbolist and decadent art first found me through my mother’s tarot collection and album covers, the building of the Art in the Margins series, and some fumbling attempts to articulate what the occult in art means to me. There’s also some talk of what’s coming in 2026. I hope you’ll give it a read.
Art in the featured image includes Alphonse Mucha, Odilon Redon, Chet Zar, Unica Zurn, Joseba Eskubi .
The hand knows before the brain does. That’s the only explanation I have for this month’s marinade, which I didn’t consciously plan as an amber collection but absolutely is one — five fragrances that live outside of ordinary time, in the deep ceremonial dark where smoke rises and resin weeps and ancient rites are preserved in gold.
Sacred rituals, gothic romance, warrior queens, a heart on a scale and eternity in the balance, candlelit castles with terrible secrets, sweet and savage and smoldering all at once. The subconscious went looking for something and found it five times over.
I don’t always post on the Unquiet Things blog here to share when I send out my monthly Trinkets & Treasures newsletter… but sometimes I do, if only as a reminder to folks that it exists!
My newsletter is different than the email notifications you get in your inbox whenever I post on the blog, and is hosted separately. Because it is separate! It’s where I share a monthly roundup of favorite things and new discoveries, and usually feature a new-to-me artist. This month’s artist is me!
I’m posting this month’s collection of fragrance reviews a little earlier than I usually do! I am headed out west for a work-related trip and won’t be back until after March 1, so I’d rather do it sooner than later. Here’s everything I sniffed and pondered upon in February, including an elusive search for a new vanilla to love…
LBTY Hera Reigns(Wherein I reimagine Hera with mean-girl main character energy at the center of a domestic thriller…) Book club is three women deep into dissecting this month’s pick: a salacious true-crime account of a podcaster’s obsession, reconstructed movements, tracked patterns, and a hunt for gruesome details. Someone’s pouring more wine. Someone else pivots to the local murder. A woman from the neighborhood (not one of us, that tacky slut with her tits always hanging out at Whole Foods, at pilates, at parent-teacher day) was found dead in the park two weeks ago. Last seen somewhere on Riverside. Then Karen mentions (almost casually, refilling her own glass for like the 3rd time, Jesus Karen) that she saw your husband’s car at the Riverside Hotel on Tuesday. The one on the highway. She wasn’t even sure it was his at first, but that dumb vanity license plate. The rosé in your own mouth pools unswallowed, sours imperceptibly. You were in the middle of mentally cataloging the rosy peonies you need, the blush ranunculus, the garden roses with that specific peachy undertone for the gala centerpieces. Your phone’s open to the florist’s website. But Karen’s words pique and prickle, a tickle, a tingle. The imaginary floral spreadsheet fades, and other, uglier thoughts rush in, unbidden, unwelcome, unspoken. Tuesday. You were at yoga. He said he was at work. That piquancy, that bright, sharply-not-sparkly effervescent quality, suddenly feels less like exuberance and more like electricity. The itchy-eerie kind that precedes the air when a storm threatens. The room keeps talking. You keep smiling. But something underneath has shifted, darkened, as if the darkness is only just now becoming aware of itself.
Haute Macabre x BPAL Light As A Feather Stiff As A Board: a lullaby sung backwards, an incantatory influorescence. Ephemeral floral and shadowed herbal, somehow both purified and unblessed, a conjuration of the unseelie court and a glory of seraphim. Cool, slightly medicinal, pale translucent blooms drifting like shawls woven of mist and moonlight, a frenzy of elf maidens at the feast, trapped in stained glass. The incense of suspended places, a liminal hush of resins, dusty echo of wood. Tarnished silver, clouded glass, filtered light, words illuminated in the margins, scattered like moths, humming and glowing.
Diptique Eau Duelle rustles like a susurrus of sighs stirring through the reeds from that exact territory Algernon Blackwood describes in his short story/novella, “The Willows.” Dry vanilla, grassy and herbaceous, maybe even rhizomatic, swaying, shifting, and restless. A humming of place, a hollow wind. Silvered marsh lights, bizarre fancies. Soft moonlight on myriad murmuring leaves. Vanilla as the uncanny antagonist of the nature trail, the weird tale the willows tell.
Pigmentarium Murmuris a perfume of Lynchian vacuum and void, the kind where silence and absence are loaded with meaning, even if you have no freaking way to articulate what that meaning is. In 1993, my sister and I cut school one day, unplanned, out of the blue. We drove around the tiny downtown of Daytona Beach (we lived locally) and browsed used bookstores and record shops. Eventually, we got brave enough to peek into Wig Villa, a shop we’d always been curious about. Disembodied plastic heads lined the walls. The silence was absolute and inexplicably dreadful. Not a soul in the store. Just us and the heads and that weird, empty air. We later arrived home to find several packages on the porch. Our mother had ordered oversized plaster statues of Jesus and Mary from Fingerhut. This day and these moments live in my memory as surreal, dreamlike, slightly nightmarish… but somehow…not bad? Just deeply, impossibly weird. Pigmentarium Murmur smells like my memories of these moments, a little freaky, a little odd, but strangely very dear to my heart. A hollow plastic note (imagine “vanilla doll head” minus the vanilla), a rose that’s pale and powdery, almost like makeup dust on porcelain, muted and earnest and lurking but endearing rather than sinister, and a sandalwood that’s soft and creaky like old wood, dreamy and worn. All existing together, but also separately, dreamlit portraits at suspended intervals, vacant vignettes, in that teeming emptiness.
A variety of vanillas I have been testing throughout the month to find the ultimate vanilla…
Fugazzi Vanilla Haze: A plastic doll head full of ozone, like a Barbie farted canned air, disorienting, unpleasant, and deeply hollow.
Indult Tihota: A throwback to the mid-to-late 2000s MUA fragrance board obsession, and since I don’t remember it from the tiny sample I had at that time, I am trying it again. A weak cocktail of whipped cream vodka topped with a scant scattering of expired confectioners’ sugar and garnished with a few strands of scorched, frizzled hair. I feel the need to time-travel and interrogate all the Tihota fangirls because I do not get it.
Tauer Vanilla Absolue: Why is there rose in this one??? I mostly loathe rose, and for a scent literally called Vanilla Absolue, finding a prominent rose facet feels like a profound betrayal!
Arte Profumi Sucre Noir This is a sweetened condensed milk/wispy cotton candy/crispy-turned-soggy cereal marshmallow/Pink Sugar-esque little thing, and I would like it to be way more noir-er.
Parfum d’Empire Madagasgar le Baume Vanille …now this is interesting. A bit musty, a bit woolly, a bit vegetal. A sort of syrupy herbal liqueur-novelty-lozenge. Linty, fuzzy, stuck in a moth-eaten pocket. A powdered snow-vanilla bean phantom at the back end. Weird and unexpected, but this is not the vanilla I am looking for, either.
Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is a bit cool and medicinal; balsam and anise are listed in the notes, so it makes sense it would come across this way to me. The longer it wears, the more I am reminded of Myrrhe Ardente from Annick Goutal, so I will just give you the review I wrote for that one: At first, it is decidedly medicinal… like an antique herbal expectorant one might procure at the local apothecary run by an unlicensed homeopathic pharmacist. It might cure you, it might kill you. It soon becomes whispery smoke and mysterious veils and soft, powdery incense made from mystical dream-tree resins. I am pretty sure Myrrhe Ardente is discontinued, but if you ever wanted to try it, Shaman Bourbon Vanilla is basically the same thing!
Arquiste Architects Club is a sophisticated vanilla chypre with salt-spray Atlantic air crispness at the back end, which makes me think of an upper-crust aristocratic party on board a yacht in international waters, posh people drinking gin and tonics. Maybe a woman in cabin 10 fell overboard. Maybe there’s a mystery. Maybe not; maybe it ends as a very intimate vanilla-skin scent.
Il Profumo Vanilla Bourbon is vanilla extract dribbled straight out of the bottle. Not store brand, more like the good stuff from Penzey’s, with a filigreed sweetened floral honey threading through it like gilding on fancy notecards. Not super basic…but also not far off from basic.
If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?
Let’s say you and your person have a weekend ritual of spending the mornings slow and soft and easy, sipping coffee, and reading books and listening to records.
(Sometimes, that is. Other weekend mornings, you might be out in the full sun at 10 am, 85 degrees on A FEBRUARY DAY, spending three hours raking up the oak leaves that muck up your yard.) (And yeah! I know raking leaves is not great for all the little bugs and things that like that sort of ecosystem, and I wish I could leave the yard alone to do its thing! But oak leaves are leathery and full of tannins and decompose very slowly and smother the grass, and the HOA here will literally have you thrown in the dungeon if your grass gets all nasty!)
Anyway, we we were listening to records. It’s the early hours, so you don’t want anything too jaunty or jangly, anxious, or aggressive. I love me some Colin Meloy, for example, but I don’t want to hear his nasally voice singing about ghostly Victorian children and maritime vengeance at 9 am on a Sunday. And as much as I adore Florence Welch, I can’t stomach her caterwauling (gorgeous though it may be) that early in the day.
