Shop For Travel Day
I remember wandering in and instantly being transported back to another era, the 1920’s and ‘30’s: a jazz record on the Victrola; sultry, sweet female voice–husky from whiskey and cigarettes–singing of far-off places, muted, languid, trumpet melody. Just ahead, off to the side: an Army-green, weather-beaten jeep with muddy desert sand in its tire grooves catching shade under a palm tree; a steamer trunk with travel stickers from every port of call; the propeller from an open-cockpit biplane casually lying in wait for the mechanic’s touch.
I wasn’t on safari in Kenya and it wasn’t 1925. I was in the Lexington Avenue Banana Republic in Manhattan in the mid-’80s and the shelves and racks were filled with quasi-military garments suited to the intrepid adventurer.
They weren’t selling clothes—they were selling dreams.
Banana Republic ads looked like pages from an early 20th Century mail-order catalog with their artist-sketched photos and sepia tones. Each featured ensemble told a story—a slice of adventure that could be your fond memory, if only you wore the correct clothes.
It was all a brilliant marketing ploy and it worked too well on someone like me, longing for travel but lacking the means…possessing only enough to buy the outfits, not the actual trip. And sometimes not even the entire outfit. I remember paying too much for a finely-woven brown, yellow, and brick-red jacquard scarf to wear with a chocolate-colored leather bomber jacket to accessorize a linen paratrooper-style jumpsuit—but I never went back to buy the leather or the linen. At least I had the scarf.
And that scarf was good for a fortnight’s worth of fantasies.
I was reminded of this recently when I looked at my “Bizarre Holiday Calendar”—the one I use for my daily radio show—and saw that it was the second Tuesday in January: National Shop for Travel Day.
An online article by Betsy Blodgett at Seamwork.com called “Adventure chic” and drew the connection to today’s nomad fad.
It was the way it made you feel, the possibility, the promise.
And the invitation irresistible: Picture yourself with an entourage in a large cream-colored canvas tent being served high tea among the dunes of the Sahara.
It’s the aura of adventure—the same reason I wander through the international aisles of food emporiums.
Nearly every article, every blog I read these days mentions travel. Then there’s Chloe Zhao’s current film about a single woman—Frances McDormand—losing everything and living in her van as she travels: Nomadland.
Travel, rootlessness, being unmoored, using the beauty of landscapes, and the feel of restless motion to escape the barbed wire restrictions of sadness and loss—it’s telling a true story for our time.
And McDormand, who earned an Oscar for my favorite Coen-Brothers’ flick, Fargo
We’ve had enough of restricted days and virtual everything…now it’s for us to turn off the screens, be intrepid, scoff at danger, adventure forth to seek what the depths of our imaginations can conceive, what our very worthy quests will dare to conjure.