Fresh from the bonus track of this coquette playlist, ‘A Night to Remember’ plays slinkily on this almost-summer Saturday night. In the attic loft window, and air conditioner hums and sputters, trying to keep the building heat at bay. Below, the Japanese garden gently waves its fronds of fountain bamboo in the slightest breeze, a host of hostas and their beautiful blue-grey leaves blend into the evening shadows, while a Japanese spikenard glows chartreuse behind a row of Japanese painted ferns. The night calls for music to remember…
Swore I’d seen you beforeWatched you walk through the doorSomething in your eyeReminded me of somebody I used to know…
The pink associated with the coquette aesthetic is a light and soft powdery pink – nothing too hot, nothing too electric, nothing too reddish, nothing too purplish, nothing too anythingish but the purest and simplest pink. It’s a whisper, it’s a brush, it’s an evocation. It doesn’t shout or demand or do much of anything other than exist in its own realm and plane, ephemeral and fleeting as the breeze. It’s a shrug and a sigh, and a collapse onto a rose-quilted antique bed.
It will be a bouquet of old-fashioned spray roses as soon as I get around to the market to find some. In the meantime, it’s a song – this song – played as the lights go dim, and the air cools down, and we whisper invitational incantations to summer…
