La Nouvelle Justine

I was skimming through a 1997 issue of Paper Magazine I recently acquired when I noticed an ad I visually became obsessed with. Like many ads from around this time, there was more thought, more playfulness, more of a do it yourself attitude. It was an ad for “La Nouvelle Justine” a bdsm restaurant with a pair of fetish heels as the ad image. 

My brain immeadeately went to season 2 episode 12 of Sex and the City La Douleur Exquise, the episode where Samantha’s is running the opening of a new s&m restaurant.

It turns out, La Douleur Exquise, actually never existed but was most likely based on La Nouvelle Justine. I am obsessed with how much of New York's past is so poorly documented online. Like many of the people and places I find myself fixated on, they all seem to have just missed the boom of the internet. Leaving us with little to no documentation on their histories. This is a major tragedy but it brings me so much joy to unearth these things.