HOT pursuits #1: messy girl summer
100% silk dancing dresses, hangover bagels, Franz Kafka, and hangxiety cures
🍓welcome to HOT pursuits: a new HOT PURSUIT OF PLEASURE segment on pleasures and how to chase them. every month i’ll be theming recommendations based on a new pleasure principle. think: books, ideas, clothes, scents, movies, activities, travel, food, musings...🍓
This month’s pleasure principle is: MESS.
As brought to you by: Lorde, 100% silk, Paul McCartney’s hangover bagels, silly t-shirts, Henry James, and anti-hangxiety measures.
Do you ever just feel like a mess?
There is something simultaneously vulnerable and uninhibited about mess, which is to say, something deeply erotic: clothes pooling on bedroom floors, a smear of lipstick where it shouldn’t be, buttons left unbuttoned, hair left unbrushed.
Mess leaves things open, available, viable and visible, rejecting organisation, closed cupboards, and well-kept secrets. Mess is always too… too… too... Talking too much at the party, being too loud at the dinner table, saying “yes” to too many plans, and giving into too strong desires. Mess smells like summer and sweat and last night’s perfume. It’s sticky wine-glasses you forgot to wash up and it’s stories you didn’t mean to tell. It’s exhilaration and it’s shame.
It is, above all, the realisation that we are neither controllable, nor entirely in control. It can be scary to feel like a mess — whether it’s a hangover, a heartbreak, or just a chaotic bedroom. But if nothing comes from nothing, then surely everything comes from everything.
PHILOSOPHIES OF PLEASURE: MESS
“I might have been born again
I'm ready to feel like I don't have thе answers
There's pеace in the madness over our heads…”— Lorde, ‘Hammer’
“All I want to know is what’s wrong with a little UPSET???? Have hours long phone calls to talk around and around and around it all. Cry at the bar, cry at the museum, cry on the bus. Kick up a goddamn fuss! God forbid we allow a little intrigue into our lives. Glamour isn’t a look, it’s lived in.”
— Marlowe Granados, ‘To Glamour & Risk: A Manifesto’
“The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.”
— Franz Kafka
Whenever I have what Holly Golightly calls “the Mean Reds”, I know it’s time to recalibrate. Most of the time with hangxiety, whatever you’ve done is either a) genuinely harmless, b) something that can be fixed with an apology (should it require one), and c) an opportunity to check on yourself and your untapped desires. If I wake up and wonder, WHY did I do THAT????, it means I’ve been trapping something in my body which has been desperate to unleash itself. This is useful information! Pay attention to it.
THINGS TO… BE A MESS IN
When I’m dancing, I want silk, and when I’m sleeping off the dancing, I want cotton (or nothing). I still haven’t found my dream loungey pyjamas (I want to look and feel exactly like Holly Golightly in her men’s shirt and sleep mask) but when it comes to dancing silks…
Buying new: The Carrie in Mauve Spot by Réalisation Par (I needed a wedding guest dress that I could also style down and this is PERFECT — the neckline is so dreamy and romantic, the bias cut is so flattering. All my other RP bits are second-hand, but I do think the brand is 100% worth the hype. Also much better quality (and often cheaper) than Reformation and Rixo).
Secondhand search terms + brands: bias cut, 100% silk, chenille, charmeuse, René Derhy, Ghost, Monsoon, Blumarine, Karen Millen, Gerard Darel, Liza Bruce (who made Kate Moss’ famous transparent dress!). There’s also a LOT of cheapish secondhand RP on Vinted and Poshmark.
I’m also a huge proponent of hangover outfits. When I’m hungover I want to feel protected and comfortable and also kind of like a sexy boy. Which means shorts and a big stupid t-shirt:
Buying new: Uniqlo Men’s Easy Stretch Shorts in Seersucker (I got these in a charity shop for £4. These are 98% cotton (the other 2% is the elastic waist), don’t compress your stomach, and are completely flash-proof, so you can lie on the grass in the park in whatever position you wish).
Secondhand search terms + brands: mid-rise, seersucker, linen, Tekla, Muji, LL Bean, Duckhead, J Crew
Buying new: I love my Hackney Saunas t-shirt from Everpress and the quality is SO SO SO good. I cannot emphasise enough how often I wear this shirt: despite being trashed and then washed about once a week for a year, the cotton is still super soft and the graphics haven’t faded at all.
Secondhand search terms: Go to any thrift store/charity shop and look through the men’s section until you find a suitably silly t-shirt.
THE ART OF… MESSY GIRL SUMMER
🍓READ
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
“I mean, here was I practically fresh out of the egg, everything was so new to me, and here was everybody telling me to stop drifting, and start living in this world; telling me to start cooking, and sewing, and cleaning, and I don’t know what. Taking care of my grandchildren.”
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki
“I took off my tights and put them in the laundry basket. I felt faint. I dropped to the kitchen floor, unable to help myself… I resolved to eat a rich and varied diet, starting tomorrow.”
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
“‘I always want to know the things one shouldn't do.’
’So as to do them?’ asked her aunt.
’So as to choose,’ said Isabel.”
🍓LOOK
The first scene in Uptown Girls, where Brittany Murphy wakes up late for her own birthday party and the camera pans over the messiest and most beautiful apartment in movie history. Murphy’s style in this film also perfectly encapsulates messiness as a varied artform: in one scene, she’s in a silk Blumarine dress, in the next, she’s wearing patchwork overalls with unwashed hair.
I keep coming back to this painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, entitled The Hours Behind You. Hilton Als described the women in the painting as "celebrat[ing] their bodies, and thus one another, in a whirlwind of joy". I love that we could be looking at five different women, or different versions of the same woman.
🍓NOURISH
Hangover bagels. The best is Paul McCartney’s bagel, which contains a lot of good healthy things (hummus! vegetables!) but is also delicious and very customisable. I also love this decadent filling which my friend Rachel invented: French Boursin + smoked salmon + fried egg.
As for when I desperately need to spend £12 and sit on a patch of grass and talk about all our messy problems with my friends: It’s Bagels in Primrose Hill, Papo’s Bagels in Hackney Downs, and Kuro Bagels in Notting Hill.
🍓LISTEN
On the bus to get my hangover bagel on Sunday, I made an anti-hangxiety playlist. I wanted something I could blast when the Mean Reds got a little too mean.
‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’ by Ella Fitzgerald is my catch-all messy girl hangover song. It’s about passing through the joys and horrors of life with your sense of humour intact. Ella has been “burned a lot / but learned a lot!”. She begins the song moonstruck and embarrassed, but ends it self-possessed and ready for whatever mess she’s thrown into next.
THE PLEASURE OF… MESS
‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’ reminds me that one of the best things about getting older is realising that being in a mess is not the end of the world. It is, in fact, a necessary part of being IN the world. I re-read Marlowe Granados’ 2025 ‘Risk and Pleasure’ manifesto the day after the summer solstice because I was experiencing intense and evil waves of hangxiety and needed to be reminded that the price of varied experience is consequences. And that’s okay! That’s A GOOD THING! As Marlowe writes, “We are all on expedition! It’s time to act like it.”
The trick is to tidy your bedroom, call a friend, and remember that most things are actually pretty funny in the re-telling.
love.
oh im so onboard for this