Tight Lacing Corsets Biography
Source:- Google.com.pkA FEW WEEKS ago, reading A. Scott Berg's biography of Golden-Age Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn, I came across an intriguing exchange. In a rare moment of ribaldry, Mr. Goldwyn's rigidly proper wife, Frances, orders a pink gin (straight gin and bitters) at a premiere party, adding with a titter, "The drink of London whores."
This passage was on my mind last week when a bottle arrived at my Queens, N.Y., apartment. Langley's No. 8, a small-batch gin, advertised itself upon its initial release in Britain as a return to form for the London Dry style, contrasting its time-honored botanical mix with the "softened, low juniper flavor profile" other brands have recently put forward in an attempt to "target female consumers." Langley's No. 8 was made for "the discerning gentleman."
With the release of the gin stateside this month, the company has dialed back the gender specificity. The brand's website now describes it as a gin for "the discerning, sophisticated consumer." Still, it's worth considering Langley's No. 8's implicit assurance that it stands as a bulwark against the rise of more "floral" gins such as Hendrick's, with its rose and cucumber notes, or Bloom, which was, upon its release a few years ago, marketed specifically to women (though the distiller—a woman—asserts that it's for everyone).
Gin has been my drink of choice since my 20s, when I had my first gimlet in honor of my favorite writer, Raymond Chandler. In his greatest novel, "The Long Goodbye," Mr. Chandler's detective hero, Philip Marlowe, famously drinks them. That was all I needed. I've had countless gimlets since, eventually expanding to other gin cocktails and even, occasionally—with "floral" concoctions like Hendrick's—drinking it straight.
So, I'm not a gin professional, merely a committed amateur. But all this anxious talk of female versus male gins strikes me as vaguely hysterical—the kind of panic typically inspired by women bobbing their hair or flinging off their corsets. At the least, it reflects Langley's strong belief that there are men out there who are made nervous by the idea they may be drinking something women drink, and are willing to pay £35 (it's going for $42 here) to get their pour on like Lord Nelson. After a rose-petal infusion, the deluge?
Is this imagined Langley's drinker one who aspires to an imagined past when discerning, ahem, consumers ruled the Earth? No. 8 boasts eight "traditional" botanicals plundered from across the globe: juniper berries from Macedonia, coriander seeds from Bulgaria, sweet orange and lemon peel from Spain, cassia bark from Indonesia and nutmeg from Sri Lanka. Of course, No. 8 is traditionally distilled in a copper pot, but she is named Connie, I'm told, short for Constance. Apparently No. 8 is feminine in origin after all. But aren't we all?
"I'm going to try this gin for men," I emailed a friend, the writer Jack Pendarvis, who favors rye.
"Don't turn into a man!" he warned.
"From the website," I said, scrolling through the Dickensian images of the brick distillery and vested bartenders, "it looks like they're targeting old white British men, possibly from the 19th century."
"Don't turn into Anthony Trollope !" he replied.
"This gin won't turn me into a man," I asserted, a bit nervously. "I will make this gin my woman."
Staring at the bottle sitting on my kitchen counter, squat with a black leather collar around its short neck, I felt distinctly as though it were looking back at me and assuming I would surely prefer a schooner of Skinnygirl Island Coconut Vodka.
But I don't believe in holding a gin's branding campaign against it—especially one that seems to have looked the American female consumer in the eye and flinched. And so, I put hand to leather.
Deciding to play the traditionalist myself, I followed the recipes on the Langley's website for the "Ultimate G & T" one night, and the "Gentleman's Martini" the next. While unable to locate the preferred Indi & Co. or Fever-Tree tonic (Canada Dry had to do), I otherwise followed the directions precisely, discerningly, and was delighted. This is juniper, I thought, inhaling piney pleasures that didn't recall air freshener even a little, but did perhaps summon my grad school, penny-pinching days of purchasing Gordon's gin instead of Tanqueray or (florals again) Bombay Sapphire. But, certainly, No. 8 was far more nuanced than Gordon's. It was tingling, sharp, delicious. By the bottom of the glass, I was reminiscing about the opium wars and recalling the days it seemed the sun would never set on the British Empire.
The following night came the Martini. Admittedly, I'm not a Martini drinker, but without the buffering effects of tonic and lime, a fundamental astringency in the gin came through.
The third night, I decided on a gimlet, for which there was no recipe on the website. Is a gimlet not the drink of a discerning gentleman?
To answer that question, let's return to Raymond Chandler, Chicago-born, but London-raised. In his "The Long Goodbye," gimlets are the delicate bonding mechanism between detective Philip Marlowe and the charismatic Terry Lennox, the man who will betray him. "They don't know how to make them here," Lennox announces at Victor's, the bar they haunt together. "What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose's Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow."
Marlowe replies, less discerningly, "I was never fussy about drinks"—but he will change his tune.
The gin itself (unnamed) is likely a London Dry, though maybe not from a pot as storied as Connie. The point is, Mr. Chandler's world, his 1950s Los Angeles, is one we've long associated with a grittier brand of masculinity, yet the drink is sweet, and infused with melancholy. And Marlowe, no gentleman but definitely a hero, warms to the gimlet, ordering many through the book, and once correcting the bartender: "No bitters." (Perhaps differentiating himself from the London whores?)
I'm not fussy about drinks either, but Lennox's ratio is too sweet for me. I wanted to both give ole No. 8 its due and, well, make it my own. So I went with four ounces of gin, then one each of Rose's and fresh lime juice, and took a sip. The juniper sang, the exotic aromatics from the globe's corners mingled peaceably. I felt softly sentimental and filled with swagger all at once. It was, to paraphrase Mr. Chandler, a gimlet to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
Tight Lacing Corsets Corset Piercing Tops Dress Wedding Dresses Training Before and After Waist Training Tattoo Costumes Prom Dress
No comments:
Post a Comment