by Clara Nanut @gour.mode

‘Curiosity killed the cat’, the British would say, but the warm and fragrant gouriosity is every Gou Gou’s favorite dish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Their bread and butter.

The truest and most sincere gouriosity is a tantalizing appetite for all that is beautiful, exquisite and at the same time mysterious to most. It is cultivated by tasting exotic specialties, crossing unexplored courtyards, studying ‘the sun and the other stars’, smelling fragrances with unusual ingredients, collecting original objects, adorning one’s hands and décolleté with the most bizarre and precious stones… and, sorry to tell you, it is never satisfied.

A true Gou Gou is born Gourious and dies Gourious, it is their lot, and they are deeply proud of it.

That is why we have decided to open up the doors of an extraordinary world to you: a wonder-room in which we keep, like treasures, our precious advice, a Cabinet de Curiosités that we have named for the occasion Cabinet de Gouriosités.

But – stop! Let’s go back in time, to find out how these Cabinets came into being and what they meant.

Gourious?

The word Wunderkammer or Kunstkammer –yes, because the aforementioned burdensome names were not enough and even the Germans demanded their own– was used as far back as the 1500s to denote particular cabinets or rooms in which extraordinary objects were kept, both for their uniqueness and their provenance. From the place of storage, in time Cabinet de Curiosités came to indicate by metonymy the collection itself.

A homage to the studioli curated by Renaissance humanists, and a less methodical and more chaotic forerunner of the contemporary museum, the Cabinet de Curiosités was a 16th-century phenomenon of collecting that also served to establish the socioeconomic status of its curator.

The Wunderkammern then rose in popularity in the 17th century, fueled by Baroque taste, and then became larger and richer thanks to the scientific discoveries of the Enlighted 18th century.

But what did a Cabinet de Curiosités have to contain in order to deserve the name? Simple: wonderful things, mirabilia, that could either come from the natural world, naturalia, or be artifacts created by human hands, artificialia.

In 1587, Gabriel Kaltemarckt revealed to Christian I of Saxony the three indispensable categories of objects for a Kunstkammer: firstly, sculptures and paintings; secondly, local and foreign curiosities; and thirdly, ‘antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals’.

Walls lined with shelves, chests, drawers, cupboards, cabinets, and display cases, enshrining boxes, bells, jars, along with elephant tusks, ostrich eggs, coral branches, plant specimens and antique prints, stuffed birds and reptiles, misshapen pearls, exotic fruit seeds, carved cameos and precious stones, shiny shells… no, we’re not listing the ingredients of the Polyjuice potion: it’s the content of the ancient Cabinet de Curiosités.

With the passing of time and fads, today’s Gou Gous would keep a different collection of extravagant objects in their Cabinet de Gouriosités.

An essential oil of Eritrean myrrh, a box of marron glacés and candied violets to pair with a cup of cinnamon Oolong tea, a set of finely crafted chinoiseries, a printed silk kimono… certainly, a pair of lobster tail earrings with river pearls or citrine crystals and a croissant-shaped headband in velvety, shimmering fabrics, but that’s another story, or maybe not.

Gourious?