True story: I was walking down the Avenue Montaigne in Paris late one night a few years ago, when I ran into a friend. “What are you doing tomorrow, Lynn?” he asked me. “Want to come to a luncheon with the Friends of Versailles?” Even though I am a lifelong, ferociously committed leftist, fiercely on the non-Versailles side of the French Revolution, there was only one answer—yes, please!
Luckily, because I am a very sick over-packer, I had a Versailles-worthy outfit stuffed in the bottom of my duffel. I am the person who thinks, what if I get invited to Versailles when I am away, and see—it happened! Let others stick a pair of panties, a bikini, and a tee in a rucksack and set off for a three-month trek through Asia—don’t you want to have a few chic alternatives in that wheeled Rimowa, that scarlet T. Anthony case, just in case?
“So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don t be sorry,” Jack Kerouac, the patron saint of hitting the road, once advised, and I am pretty sure he meant—don’t be sorry you didn’t bring a pair of velvet evening slippers!
Here, Vogue.com’s guide to packing for everything from African safari to a dude ranch to an idyll in the Italian countryside:
