Model Karolin Wolter is styled by Suzanne Koller in 'I Dreamed of Africa', lensed by Colin Dodgson for T Magazine May 20, 2018.

The accompanying article by Thessaly La Force 'A Solo Sojourn Inspired by Edith Wharton's 'In Morocco', published in 1920 when she traveled the region with Hubert Lyautey, who served as the resident general of French Morocco from 1912 to 1925. By the end of the First World War, Morocco was still a colonial entity, divided between French and Spanish powers (the country would claim independence in 1956). There were no English-language guidebooks and few accounts from those who had traveled past the international port city of Tangier (“frowsy, familiar Tangier, that every tourist has visited for the last forty years,” Wharton complained in her book).

Like most rich and successful people with the means to travel, Wharton observed that Morocco's beauty was is vast decay, without ever observing or considering once the damge colonialism may have caused throughout the African continent. Wharton writes: “Overripeness is indeed the characteristic of this rich and stagnant civilization. Buildings, people, customs, seem all about to crumble and fall of their own weight: the present is a perpetually prolonged past.”

In this aspect of her observations, Wharton was trapped in her white privilege. Nevertheless, writes La Force, Wharton possessed a blunt understanding of "the devastating truth that women, no matter where in the world, were trapped by their own society. Wharton may have had grave blind spots, but she knew very well that her own freedom — as an educated woman unencumbered by children, with a great inheritance and a greater intellect — was rare." Read on at T Magazine.