I was barely 21 the first time I set eyes on Sin City. That made this London boy old enough (just) to enjoy everything it had to offer, beginning with the football-field-size buffet at the Sands, my first all-American, all-you-can-eat experience. Ever since, I've relished the city's sequins-on, shoulders-back shamelessness, a joie de vivre that the French can only dream about. Indeed, much like America itself, Vegas has an elastic ability to co-opt and absorb foreign cultures, French or otherwise, like EPCOT with cocktails and Cirque du Soleil. The Strip, its fluorescent centerpiece, is the truest example of ersatz, with its miniature Eiffel Tower, facsimile of Venice complete with gondoliers, and gleaming Egyptian pyramid crowned by lasers. But above all, Vegas represents an absurdist Platonic ideal: a land of plenty, more American than apple pie, and twice as delicious. Decades after that first trip, I will still stand transfixed on the Strip in bone-dry 110-degree heat as half-familiar names and faces blare from the dozens of illuminated signs perched jauntily above the sidewalk. For some, the city is terrifying, a garish cartoon of debaucherybut that's why I love it so. Come here to shed your inhibitions, and your clothes, without thinking twice about either.

This article appeared in the August/September 2020 issue of Cond Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.

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Las Vegas Is Too Much for MostBut That's Why I Love It - Cond Nast Traveler