Holiday first graced American newsstands in 1946, at a moment when the world was emerging from the shadows of war and yearning for adventure. For three decades, it was one of the most extraordinary magazines ever published — a travel title that commissioned Graham Greene, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, and John Steinbeck, paired them with photographers who captured the world's beauty in ways that felt revolutionary, and treated travel not as tourism but as literature. By 1977, it had faded into memory. Then, in 2014, Parisian art director Franck Durand brought it back.
The revived Holiday is a biannual, English-language magazine with a distinctly French sensibility. The editorial premise is refreshingly simple: send a writer and a photographer to a specific location with no constraints on style, length, or budget, and let the story unfold at whatever pace the place demands. The result is a kind of travel writing that reads more like a well-paced novel than a destination guide — immersive, personal, and entirely uninterested in the listicle format that dominates contemporary travel media.
The visual language honours the mid-century original while pushing it into the present. Each issue is a gallery of ambitious photography given room to breathe — sprawling across double-page spreads, arranged in rhythms that feel almost cinematic. The paper quality, the typography, the generous white space: everything about the physical object communicates that this is a magazine designed to be kept rather than discarded, displayed rather than scrolled past.
What makes the revival remarkable is that it is not a nostalgia project. Durand understood that what made the original Holiday great was not its era but its ambition — the conviction that travel writing could be art, that a magazine about places could also be a magazine about literature and photography at their highest level. The new Holiday carries that conviction into the twenty-first century, proving that the most compelling travel stories are still the ones told slowly, beautifully, and with the confidence that the reader has nowhere else to be.
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