Before there was Instagram, there was Holiday magazine. Between 1946 and 1972 this gorgeous American title generated fabulous FOMO with issue after beautiful issue of precisely written and gloriously photographed fantasy travel editorial.
The magazine was cannily revived by a French publisher in 2014, and for Resort 2020 Emilia Wickstead just as cannily exhumed its spirit for a collection that could have graced its pages the first time around—and which will look just as enviable on your feed today. Informed in spirit, print, and colorway by Holiday, Wickstead’s Resort itinerary spanned the decades to produce an alluring transseasonal itinerary of destination dressing.
The many ready-to-share, ready-to-wear stopovers worth lingering upon included prim, graphically striped skirts, shirtdresses, and dresses played against ski-print crepe shirting; lavishly volumized black Lurex dresses heavily stamped with pleat; and wild python-print PVC pieces that brought the tour through Holiday’s jetset decades up to date. Christmas florals—jolly holly-spiked twists of bloom—were featured in summer-weight crepes, and those stripes were reduced and lightened on berry-toned voiles ripe for ballooning in a summer breeze. Punchy green or red dresses, full of skirt and arm with sweetheart necklines, came in waffled crepe designed for crease-free packing. The shoes, bags, and hats were all in shapes carried over from Fall to allow the frequent-flier Wickstead traveler to seamlessly update this new route into her wardrobe. This was a collection that cleverly accessed a long-gone world of analogue escapism, all altered to fit the digital today.
