Instead of harrumphing about how shallow we find T+L nowadays--how overly concerned with cool shopping and boutique hotels--we will, instead, merely remark that we apparently are not the demographic for this journal. There's hardly a full page of prose to be found, anymore. Perhaps to keep up with the television/smartphone age where folks have no more patience every page had garish charts and info boxes and snarky quotes in silly fonts.
EAT. SHOP. SEE+DO.
We won't spend time on the confluence of advertising and articles. If memory serves a recent issue had an essay about a certain brand of watch. Watches do in fact come in handy when travelling but we didn't see why this particular brand of timepiece needed to be singled out.
Grumblings aside, the photographs, though, still stop one in their beauty. There's one of Page 84 of two Indian gentlemen holding some beautiful textiles, grogeous yellow and red. The simplicity of the shot contrasts with the richness of the hues, the craft needed to create the rugs.
This disenchantment with T+L is especially sad as it was our first introduction to non-family vacations. Cockatoo used to spend part of the high school summer break with her Godmother who had a collection of T+L. We would pore through them excitedly, as if trying to pin down the fact that, really, one can actually get on a plane and go to another country.
Cockatoo can never truly give up on T+L. It--along with a college course on the Renaissance--did provide the spark that got us to Florence, a place we've visited twice and long to see again. (Last time we stayed Oltrarno, steps away from the Piazza Santo Spirito, pictured.)
Still, one worries. Could a working class person look at today's magazine and get that same sense of possibilities? Or would they look at the astronomical rates of the featured hotels and decide travelling isn't for them?
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