Time travelling In Retrospect

Toot toot! That is the sound of me blowing my own trumpet, because I have been told I should do it more often. Why am I blowing it? Because I have a feature on art deco travel destinations in the latest issue of In Retrospect magazine.

I don't really talk in detail about my day job on this blog, as I'm usually keen to keep work and play fairly separate. I work in magazines, and really believe you need an interest in the subject to do a good job, even if you're doing mainly sub-editing like I do, or layouts. (Obviously it's absolutely essential for writers.) This means if I'm not careful to maintain a division between work and play, the work can end up bleeding into my free time and stressing me out. That's also why Crinoline Robot is an absolutely non-commercial blog; I spend all day working to create something to please other people, but this blog is made to please myself. If I started taking a commercial approach, I'd be on the highway to Stress City.

Writing for In Retrospect was fun because I got to submit an idea for something I wanted to write (I got my boss' permission beforehand). I'm not going to repeat my feature here, but I did want to talk about my aims in writing it. First, I was keen to keep it international: there are some fantastic deco destinations globally, and I wanted to mention some of the major, yet less well-known locations. Shanghai and Mumbai may not be the first places that spring to mind when you think of deco, but they really are important, with both a high number of deco buildings and distinct regional styles. Of course, from Miami to Morecambe I didn't miss out the obvious places.

Burgh Island hotel. Deco paradise.

On top of that, I wanted my feature to be relevant to lots of people, not just the white and/or western. Often people speculate on why vintage seems to be a strongly caucasian subculture – Nora did a fascinating post recently on why Asian people don't often wear vintage – but one thing we can all do to make a wider range of people feel like vintage is for them is celebrate amazing vintage from around the world. That can open up debates about wrongs done in that period, but just as I'm sure none of the vintage lovers I know would actually like to live in a world where women were expected to give up work on marriage, same-sex relationships were illegal and there was no NHS (might not get a choice on that one...), I'm pretty sure that we can celebrate the beauty of places like the Lakshmi Insurance Building of Mumbai without wanting to bring back colonialism.

(Um, how did I get on this soapbox?)

Shona from Heyday! wrote about beach pyjamas. DO WANT.

The magazine is really packed with all sorts of fascinating stuff, from opinion pieces on topics such as 'Authenticity' (Ava Aviacion) and 'Is Chivalry Sexist' (G. M. Norton) to articles on 20th century men's underwear (Mathew Keller) and the history of burlesque (Blaire Rowland interviewing Lena Mae). There are book reviews, including Porcelina's one of Vintage Fashion Complete, telly reviews and a really good national events listing. One of the things I really love about In Retrospect is that it's written by both male and female vintage enthusiasts, so the topics are diverse but all absolutely fascinating. If you like the look of all that, you can see a preview and buy a copy here.