Flâneur Magazine
Travel magazines are such a dull affair – in fact, they shouldn’t even be called travel magazines – tourist magazines would be a more apt description. More concerned with the best beach resorts, hotels and restaurants than anything about the country in question or its people, they are mostly bland affairs for people with money but very little imagination.
It’s quite surprising there’s been no ‘edgy’, interesting, travel magazines on the shelves, so it’s a pleasure to receive a few issues of Flâneur (a flâneur is someone who likes to wonder a city). Like a cross between Colors, Vice and Eye, it’s a visually exciting as well as a fascinating publication, featuring a bewildering array of obscure features, graphic design and photo essays such as Arabic type faces, international cinema posters and cigarette packets, belly-dancing clubs in Cairo, chess in Kuta, oysters in New Orleans, Indonesian poetry and Mexican guerrilla dolls. And that's just the first five pages of issue one. ‘Either everything matters or nothing does.’ Interestingly, each issue has a different design and masthead.
Flâneur magazine – ‘A travel magazine for the discerning loafer’ – is published quarterly, priced £6.
(Obviously I’ve just made this magazine up, but if someone wants to finance it for real, that would be great.)