The writers, photographers, artists and stylists who have brought you these stories from around the world
Having been a New York and then Paris-based actor, writer, editor, curator and artist, Dannatt was an obvious choice of writer for our feature on the Manhattan life of Salvador Dalí. Described by the Louvre as a “dilettante and flâneur”, the eccentric Englishman is co-author of Surrealism in Wales. His most memorable recent journey was “finding myself by mistake pedaling through the midst of a London nudist bicycle rally while formally fully dressed in a seersucker suit and tie”.
After collaborating with fashion designer Alexander McQueen for 13 years, a Beyond assignment for this Paris-based artist to photograph a trunk collector was a refreshing challenge. Of all the journeys she’s made, her favorite is into Manhattan. “There is this big sign on the road saying, ‘Have a dream’, and on the other side, ‘Nothing happens unless first a dream’. It always reminds me that nothing is impossible, and with a mix of talent, luck, good encounters and hard work, you can achieve almost everything.”
The author of Sam Spiegel: The Biography of a Hollywood Legend, Fraser-Cavassoni started her career working for Karl Lagerfeld in the Chanel studio. Since then, between interviewing designers for Beyond, the daughter of royal biographer Lady Antonia Fraser has written several books, her most recent about Yves Saint Laurent muse Loulou de la Falaise. Her most memorable trip was last year to Abu Dhabi: “I felt like I was in a mirage when visiting the future Louvre museum, and a mosque that can house 38,000 worshippers.”
The award-winning novelist and historian has not only visited Istanbul dozens of times to research his Ottoman mystery novels, but also spent six months walking to the city from Poland: a journey he describes in this issue. The long hike was “one that kindled my fascination with the Ottoman Empire, as we walked through a world touched by its lingering influence: a minaret in northern Hungary or a gulp of very strong black coffee, or the sight of gypsy women in glorious swirling colored skirts”.
The great granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill was the ideal writer to analyze the style of some of the world’s best-dressed mothers and daughters. Now resident in Hong Kong, the former features editor of The Sunday Times Style travels regularly throughout the East on assignment. She recently sailed on a traditional Indonesian phinisi around the Mergui archipelago in southern Burma, where she saw one other vessel in ten days. “There can’t be many places left on earth where you get that sense of escape,” she says.
The New York-based arts journalist and former deputy editor of W contributes regularly to publications ranging from The New Yorker to Architectural Digest. For Beyond she interviews
the American artist Fred Tomaselli, whose psychological journeys are represented in wild kaleidoscopic collages. The most memorable journey of her own? “Getting up at dawn in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, and seeing a cheetah having its breakfast. Here was nature, unfolding before my eyes.”