Your Vintage Requests + My Dream Role in the Bug Ballet
Beeltecore trench coats, silk going-out tops, raffia totes, & more
I have been afflicted by an incurable jealousy thanks to a legion of insect puppets.
In Bug Ballet, creator Orren Fen performs as the fly with a dramatic and pleading papier-mache “O” for a mouth. There are eagle-sized moths circling a lightbulb sculpture commanded by pink tutu-ed ballerinas and maggots and worms of all girths and sizes wriggling about on stage in squirmy fits.
I don’t really know what Bug Ballet is about—but I know I need to be there.
Bug Ballet first came to me through a video on my FYP (a reminder that occasionally the TikTok algorithm does good things for society), but seeing as I don’t live in Minneapolis and that the show’s 10-day-long run was sold out, I didn’t get to attend, and I’ll have to live with that forever. (Unless…? 2027 nationwide bug tour?)
The ballet hasn’t left my mind in the weeks since my discovery of it—in fact, it sort of keeps growing in strength like an arthropod Hydra—and it was right up front in the plumpest folds of my brain when I plucked out a shiny blue trench coat from my closet.
The vintage London Fog, a piece from my late grandmother, is my own shimmering exoskeleton. It’s not a clean metallic (its life’s purpose is to be drenched in mucky rain water, after all) but a grimy, of-the-earth metallic, like a glistening navy scarab or a blue milkweed beetle. It’s got shoulder pads, a chunky lapel, and it’s not afraid to get dirty.
In my metallic blue trench, I’d play a beetle private detective in a bug ballet. A beret atop my beetle head with two cut-outs in the wool for my feathery beetle antennae. My delicate beetle wings would unfold from the back of the trench and carry me away over the audience as the rest of the insects swarm to center for the final big number. It would be bug-tastic. For now, the sidewalk will have to be my stage.
For paid subscribers: 30+ secondhand & vintage finds requested by you.
This batch includes, yes, fab London Fog trenches in beetle-licious colorways, silk going-out tops, oversized raffia totes that won’t break the bank, & more.
More on Beetlecore from Yeehawt’s earlier days -
