Out Now: Voyage D’Etudes, #1
We first discovered Voyage D’Etudes just over a year ago: an online travel ‘scrapbook’ edited by Refinery29’s fashion director Paula Goldstein Di Principe. The site features travel memories written by journalist and photographer contributors (dubbed the #globalgirlgang), and each article has the tone of a diary and is accompanied by images of objects collected during a trip.
This month, Paula has released her first every physical scrapbook – a large-format collection of images, stories, moments, art, people and places sourced during her time travelling through America (which she describes as ‘one of the most addictively inspiring places on earth’). Each page is hand-drawn, pictures have been cut out and put together with ‘gluey fingers’, and there’s lots of inky and blotted text that was written on a typewriter. It’s handmade and scrappy like a Rookie yearbook, and Paula doesn’t call the publication a magazine but rather ‘part art book, part zine, party diary’.
The scrapbook relishes in the kitsch and the iconic: there’s Dolly Parton’s memories of growing up in Tennessee, street photographs of New York City, a story on Walt Disney, and a look at the changing faces of Barbie. There’s also a bespoke playlist with a song for every State (to ‘transport you’ across the USA), portrait pictures, images of Buzz Aldrin and Cuban-American musician Willy Chirino, and pictures taken on open roads with disposable cameras. It’s a highly personal and intimate love letter to pop culture which contains a sprinkling of the energetic and ironic sensibility of Marfa Journal and Fruitlands Zine.