The Wicker Collins

Our first Sexy Kit is the Wicker Collins, and it makes us nostalgic for summer. When longing for the days of dapper upward mobility and boozy ennui, we unbutton our white jackets and make for the pool, darling, with three items on our silver serving tray…

Our drink is a Cucumber Collins (props to Brilliant Cocktails).

Recipe:
5 cl Hendrick’s Gin

1cl Lime Juice

1cl Lemon Juice

1-2 cl Sugar Syrup

Cucumber

The cucumber and lime are muddled in a chilled mixing glass. Add the lemon, sugar syrup and gin and shake with ice. Strain into a tall glass and top with soda. Garnish with a long slice of cucumber, and lemon twist if you’re feeling zesty.

I once almost kicked a man out of my house for saying it was better than Gatsby.

Our book is Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Collins is like an F. Scott novel, but not Gatsby. The Collins is a long afternoon drink. Tender is the Night is F. Scott on a lazy afternoon instead of a tight-wound evening. It’s denser and tends more to surrender to the author’s luxurious verbal inebriation. Depressing, but in that sort of lovely, loose-limbed, “Oh, this book makes me sad, that makes me feel pretty, I’ll think I’ll have another drink” way. And there’s little that’s more classically elegant than Americans having misguided and regret-ridden sex in France.

Ayten Gasson Colette

The lingerie that completes the set is Ayten Gasson’s Colette range. Supposedly Nicole in Tender is the Night is based on Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, and this is total Zelda lingerie. It makes you want to lie on a large porch thinking about how you used to be a ballerina and how did you end up becoming a kept woman always verging on mental illness, and then when your rich, handsome and troubled husband comes back to your hotel room, saying “Oh, I’ve been too elegantly depressed to change out of this all day. Oh, it’s too hot. Let’s go drive somewhere. Oh, no, let’s not. Oh, yes, let’s.”

Also, tap pants, very 1920s. And flattering on most everyone.

Tags: Ayten Gasson's Colette, Book, Cocktail, Cucumber Collins, Lingerie, Tender is the Night