[Author’s Note: I’ve since learned people actually call it “Clando”]
Walk by any bar or restaurant in New York City, and it’s likely that a hot girl™, dressed in her peasant blouse best, will be sipping a Martini from a frosty glass with one to three olives. Preceded by the Cosmopolitan, the Moscow Mule, the Negroni, the Aperol Spritz and the Espresso Martini (which, contrary to what the NYTimes Styles section says, actually became popular in New York during the summer of 2020, almost a year after it was fashionable in Copenhagen—the birthplace of many NYC trends), a classic Martini is the drink of summer 2021.
As with all food history, and most other time-place specific histories, the place and year of the Martinis' birth is disputed. However, what’s generally agreed upon is that it was originally a 1:1 ratio of gin to vermouth. As time went on and bartenders experimented with different ratios, sweet versus dry vermouth, the Martini has gotten dryer and dryer. A dry Martini with olives has become the drink du jour and as far as cocktails go it’s not for the faint-palated. It’s 6 parts gin, around 3 oz, to one part dry vermouth, 1/2 oz, then stirred with ice and strained into a chilled cocktail glass. It is not universally palatable in the same way its predecessors are, but it is certainly the strongest and sexiest of the bunch.
via SFGate
The Martini’s cultural legacy is built upon its reputation as the drink of businessmen like John D. Rockefeller and Matthew McConaughey’s character on The Wolf of Wall Street, of mystery men like James Bond and inimitable women like Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development. It’s the drink of movie producers, editors and Joan Didion. It’s also the drink of politicians like Gerald Ford who loved a three-martini lunch, and of one the most famous Martini-drinking people in history, Winston Churchill who, when asked how he wanted his drink prepared, apparently said, “I would like to observe the vermouth from across the room while I drink my martini.” Meaning: a Churchill Martini is basically just gin diluted with trace amounts of melted ice served with a twist or olives.
For a drink this strong, it’s remarkable that its signals are somehow stronger. Though the all day everyday martini-drinking rich woman trope (i.e. Jasmine of W**dy All*n’s Blue Jasmine and Grace from Grace and Frankie) holds some space in my mind, it’s not nearly as strong as the masculine associations I hold for the Martini: a drink I’m inclined to say sits primarily at the intersection of rigid masculinity, whiteness and privilege. The imagery that accompanies a dry Martini with olives is steeped in vivid imaginations that can include WASPs or hard-core, bohemian intellects nourishing their minds with rigorous debates about abstract topics. Think Luis Buñuel in some charming, nondescript Parisian café-bar discussing big ideas with Man Ray and Salvador Dali. In these mind’s eye visions it seems impossible that they could’ve fueled their bodies with anything other than hard liquor adorned with three olives on a skewer of some kind—be it a cocktail pick or a thin, red disposable coffee stirrer depending on the locale.
I can’t tell if people are drinking martinis because:
statistically speaking, people—particularly women—have increased their alcohol intake and tolerance since the pandemic began.
there seems to be an interest in reviving the aesthetics of wry wit and intellectualism, imitating the lifestyles of notable New Yorkers c. the time when the Village Voice and Interview chronicled the people, places, habits and ideas of New York City’s cultural/literary elite. Let’s call it the Drunken Canal effect.
in the midst of all the closures that occurred across the City, some of its oldest establishments, the ones with loyal customers and no signature cocktails, somehow survived and now young people are “rediscovering” “old-school classics.”
And I certainly can’t tell if people actually enjoy drinking them because frankly it doesn’t seem to matter.
I can’t tell if it’s hilarious or depressing that young people, especially those that might be part of the next guard of New York’s media world, are all drinking martinis like their predecessors did when Martini-fueled lunches were the norm for respected writers and editors. On one hand I find it fascinating that this drink is popular among media people, on the other I find it curious that the Martini has become the domain of young, white women, and on my fingers I can count the rest of the reasons I find the revival of the dry Martini in New York interesting, namely: what it says about the year we’ve had, the beginning of the beginning regarding changes within media despite the fact that the bricks of these ivory towers are still largely intact, and how fashion continues to reign.
There is a quote by Georg Simmel, a German philosopher-sociologist who helped establish sociology as a discipline in the late 1800’s, that I think of often: “Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes modern, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.” As someone who was once intimidated by the physics that goes into holding a Martini glass filled to the brim, I tried one for the first time just before the pandemic started at the now shuttered Lucky Strike (known for serving Martinis with a sidecar on ice). Once I started seeing Condé Nast writers I admire and people I vaguely know posting their empty cocktail glasses—with remains of empty skewers or a lemon peel—in droves, I read up on the history of the drink, explored different recipes and then started mixing them at home. Over the course of four Saturdays I tried to get it right and never did. Now that you know my history, perhaps you can understand why I feel I’m in a position to admit on behalf of us all that a dry Martini is one of those “atrocious things.”
I’m sure that some of you reading this might be thinking, “maybe for you, but not for me.” And maybe 2% of you are right. Like its health fad cousins celery juice and apple cider vinegar water, some may acquire the taste for the Martini—and even come to enjoy it. However, if it weren’t for the fashion of it I don’t know if the collective appetite for this cocktail (which has nothing besides some melted ice and olive brine residue to temper gin’s pungent juniper taste) would be as strong.
Fashion is understood primarily by its material expression: clothes, shoes and accessories made by the industry we call fashion. Yet fashion extends far beyond the unwieldy industry. It’s novels being written without quotation marks, period films with a cheeky, modern tone, TV shows with time blurring plots, mid-century chairs and bulbous couches furnishing townhouses and apartments alike, and 70s-funk inspired bass beats reentering pop music. The connective thread across these different facets of fashion is its elusiveness. Just as we find our way to the party people are already en route to the next one. And though it may have the basic elements of the last one, just like the ones that came before it, it’s different enough that we feel compelled to get on the subway and head over to the party everyone’s talking about now.
If you dig deep enough, at a certain point you’ll find that fashion objects are little more than pawns of desire. We defer to our insecurities in the name of fashion, our longing fueled by a number of internal and external factors that make us want, incessantly. For whatever we’re overcompensating and whoever we’re trying to become, we’re the generation that’s grown up with complete assurance that stuff can make it happen. Especially in New York, where we’re more frequently seen by strangers in passing moments than people who truly know us, these tools of being and becoming are basically all we have. Though I’d only been to Clandestino twice in 2019, the current homebase for hot girl Martini drinkers, I don’t even need to pass by the popular Dimes Square spot or The Odeon, Dr Clark, Balthazar or Lucien to know that tables are crowded with cocktail glasses at varying points of emptiness. These spots, and others like it in New York City, are a petri dish for the kind of fashion preferred by hot girls and boys and people with an appetite for staying ahead and above the zeitgeist. Like a pair of two-tone loafers or tinted sunglasses, a full Martini glass is today’s IYKYK for a particular sect of New Yorkers who communicate through IYKYK objects.
Not to mention: there’s a toughness to being a Martini drinker that is offset by the elegance of drinking clear spirits in a cocktail glass. A well-known secret is that it’s actually nearly impossible to drink from without spilling. But that’s the thing, people who drink-drink Martinis don’t spill.
Even if they’ve only recently become the kind of people who drink-drink Martinis.
[Author’s Note: No shade to anyone who’s included here]
I started noticing an uptick in the number of young Martini drinkers in December 2020. Many of them young, white women. Many of them part of a nouveau literary-esque scene that is finding the formerly untapped middle ground between The New Yorker and Twitter. The rest of the cohort being people in marketing, fashion, the DJ scene and other creative industries. Scrolling, tapping and observing the glasses on people’s tables as I walk by outdoor tables has made it clear that young people are exploring a new corner of the liminal space between then and now. It became fairly clear to me how truly influential the prestigious institutions, and the accompanying fantasies of old New York, still are. The cyclical nature of trends suggests that disruptions are usually well-chosen revivals, revealing the fact that we can’t escape our ontological need to belong.
It seems to me that these women in their 20s, probably living in downtown Manhattan or maybe in one of the trendy neighborhoods of Brooklyn, are conforming to the old imaginations of the media industry. Since the gatekeepers have been, and continue to be, predominantly white men, it seems the least they can do now is drink like them so they can one day drink with them. Meeting at the fashionable, modern-nostalgic bars devoid of any real grit or grimness, going to those restaurants where people are there more for the Instagrammable backdrop than the food, and tweeting between themselves are variations of the same mentality that has kept the media industry cloistered for so long.
It becomes a bit confusing when you consider that media writers, journalists and critics today are encouraged to be individuals and reinforce their voice through social media. It would seem that young people now have an unprecedented opportunity to disrupt the industry in one way or another. In reality, though their methods may seem unconventional, their tweets and Instagram stories and bylines reveal they are conforming to the same behaviors and mindsets that have long dictated New York’s media elite—revealing once again that part of being able to find a way through the gates is understanding what you’re even looking for, an initial knowingness learned either at home or at school that makes clear why the gateway is opening just a little wider for certain people and not for others.
The line that distinguishes co-opting versus collapsing into trends is so fine it’s almost negligible. When we consider that our standards and norms are outlined by whiteness and a patriarchal framework, even the most benign thing, such as a cocktail, becomes an expression of that mindset. In the same way that certain shifts suggest progress is being made with regard to women’s empowerment—i.e. maternity leave, women supposedly having the same “permission” / ability as men to pursue casual sex and the body positivity movement—these tokens of change are supposed to provide women with some semblance of autonomy. However, they do so in a way that doesn’t fracture the status quo with any truly meaningful effects.
When it comes to fashion, young people, particularly young women, are vital to delineating the contours of culture. They may not start these trends, but they play an important role in the dissemination of fashion locally and globally. Though an interest in fashion is often trivialized, the residue of narratives that tell young women, all women, they are seen before they are heard is why fashion continues to be inextricably linked to our sense of autonomy. Even the most liberated women among us would be short-sighted if they saw themselves as truly separate from this world in which being in the know and acting on it with an unexpected, but recognizable, degree of flair facilitates getting a foot through most doors.
So, it’s not surprising that this summer the hot girls, especially those with literary and media (but also film, art and fashion industry) aspirations, are drinking Martinis. Though magazines and papers have talked about their commitment to making space for writers and editors who have been traditionally excluded from their pages, what’s expected of employees at these publications, as well as the underlying principles, remain rooted in a mentality that still fits in a cocktail glass—probably shaken with gin, with olives or a twist.
This was very interesting to read as a non-New Yorker. I remember ordering a martini at a restaurant that felt far too fancy for me soon after graduating. I certainly did not like martinis “but wished I did.” I hardly considered why I was choking down (and for sure spilling) this nasty drink just to portray a certain story about myself.