Welcome to Traveling Through, a podcast hosted by David Prior, where we trace the places, encounters, and unexpected discoveries that have influenced some of today’s most creative minds. Listen on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Deborah Needleman used to travel in a black Mercedes between fashion shows. These days, she is more likely to be crossing Morocco in search of village basket weavers.
Needleman is a longtime magazine editor whose career has included some of the biggest titles in design and style. She founded Domino, went on to edit WSJ. Magazine, and later became editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
But in 2016, she stepped down, tired of what she calls the “fashion bubble” of grand hotels and tightly scheduled travel. The week she would normally have been at the Paris shows, she enrolled at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Appalachia to learn to make brooms. Having spent her career “living in [her] head as a writer and editor,” she found fulfillment working with her hands, a turn that eventually led her to basketry.
These days, craft is a key criterion when it comes to planning a trip. In Venice, she spent a month researching the city’s basket-making history through oil paintings and the plants of the lagoon. More recently, a project on Amazigh weaving sent her across northern Morocco, visiting archives, collectors, and makers still producing baskets for everyday use.
To Needleman, a curiosity-led approach to travel is one that we could all use a little more of: “Having a particular interest and bringing it into a place is a fantastic way to connect,” she says.
Needleman and podcast host David Prior have put that idea into practice together, too, including on an early PRIOR trip through India centered on textiles. The episode revisits that journey and one particularly ill-fated dinner in Kolkata involving a shortage of candles, a room full of guests, and a minor fire.
Perhaps the most revelatory lesson comes from Needleman’s mother-in-law, who had little in the way of wanderlust but managed to collect some 10,000 egg cups from around the world. When you give yourself something to look for, Needleman says, a place can open up in unexpected ways.
Watch the full episode above, or listen by subscribing on Apple Music or Spotify.
