The Sunday Chronicle: Extraordinary News About Ordinary Modern Life 🗞️

For the Recraft × Contra Archive Style Challenge, I explored historical newspaper posters and lithographs by George Reiter Brill, an American lithographer, from The Met’s collection. Inspired by his 1890s advertisements for the Philadelphia Sunday Press, I imagined how that vintage newspaper aesthetic might report on our lives today.

And so, The Sunday Chronicle was born – a fictional newspaper where doomscrolling, procrastination, endless notifications, and the struggle to take a “candid” photo deserve their own dramatic headlines.

The idea was to make modern habits look like front-page scandals from another era – a little nostalgia, a little satire, and perhaps a few too many familiar situations. 😅

The result is below 👇

Damask Daydream grew out of my love for the soft pink of old parlours, which is why most of the style is drawn from pale damask, embroidered silk and gilded chairs dressed in striped fabric. In those rooms pink was the color of private luxury and quiet romance, and I wanted that same warmth to carry through every page of the series.

On its own that pink could easily feel like decoration, so I paired it with a romantic sunset landscape and a naive jungle painting that bring in glowing skies, oversized leaves and a gentle sense of strangeness. Those two paintings are what tip the style into pop surrealism, as though the parlour had drifted off to sleep and begun to dream.

The series imagines the pages of a fashion art book that was never published, a collection of editorial covers shot inside that dream. Real models with natural faces share each frame with giant blooms, enormous fruit and objects that grow in impossible ways, turning every image into a botanical surrealist spread where the colors and textures of the past quietly shape a very modern world.

Damask Daydream Style Video