The Traveler Who Left the Fashion Bubble to Learn Basketry

Deborah Needleman, the founding editor of Domino and former editor in chief of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, spent years traveling to fashion shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris—roughly two months per year in a chauffeured bubble. "I hated it," she says flatly. "For many people going to fashion shows sounds like a really sort of glamorous thing, but when you are really involved in them, they're not that glamorous." The reality: getting in and out of cars, sitting on hard benches waiting for shows to start, watching seven-minute presentations, and then fighting through crowds to do it again. She quit and enrolled at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Appalachia—the oldest folk school in America—to learn basket weaving, something she had never done. Instead of the Bristol Hotel in Paris, she found herself at morning song sessions with fiddle music and clog dancing, learning to work with her hands alongside strangers. "There is something really beautiful about a bunch of strangers coming together and working on something and learning something at the same time," she says. "There's a real connection. And that was something I was really missing."

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