Photographs: Monty Coles The Loupe
It was a fizzy little heartstarter to Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival: 20 frocked-up ladies mustered for love of the millinery arts (and fruity promise of a bubble and canape or three) in an airy garden room tucked behind The National Trust‘s splendid Como House.
Staff from a chic new cafe, The Stables of Como by the prolific Icke & Igby hospitality group, served flutes of the fancy new sparkling wine by jewellery designer Samantha Wills for Yellowglen with trays of tiny lemony tarts, fudge brownies no bigger than a thumb, glitter-crusted cookies and impossibly pretty fairy cupcakes.
Half an hour of girly cacophony and our teacher for the day, milliner Richard Nylon, called time on the sugar high with the customary hand-flap and, “Ladies. Ladies! LADIES!!”. We sat, obediently fluteless and temporarily tartless, if not quietly, in comfortable rows either side of a long, white linen-clad table. Lovely.
A spring flower garden was sprung in a menagerie of glass jars and bottles down its middle and, before each of us, a careful arrangement of one head band, one feather (white or black), two fluffy tufts of…stuff (black), six silky flowers (red and pink), and a length each of ribbon, vintage guipure lace, hailspot netting and milliners’ crinoline with a small pair of scissors and pot of glue to share.
The Victoria Racing Club commissioned the flambouyant Mr. Nylon to host this beginners’ millinery class ahead of Saturday’s Turnbull Stakes Day at Flemington, a traditional kicker to its Melbourne Cup Spring Racing Carnival. Today however, Mr. Nylon presents as au naturale as I have ever seen him: stripped back (no top hat, no waxed moustache or walking stick, no bead-fringed mask swinging over his eyes) to a relatively simple purple shirt, turquoise cravat and peacock blue waistcoat in honor of Yellowglen Peacock Lane by Samantha Wills‘ label livery.
The lesson begins. Oblivious to a press of media cameras ducking around us and poking politely into our work, we kink and fray the crinoline, twist and glue it onto the headband, torture and strip feathers into spearheads, lollipops and lightening bolts, scatter the flowers and fluffs, pose in our half-done head things, glue thumbs to fingers and lace bits into our hair…..
And laugh. It’s a happy hoot, a glorious morning.
Mr. Nylon is ahead of us all, peppering his lesson with odd-ball millinery tidbits plumbed from his vast vat of historic fashion facts. Flowers, he breezily informs us, are sexual organs. Feathers are modifed scales; proof of birds’ evolutionary link with dinosaurs. Hailspots on veiling hark back centuries to the heady days of pox when scars were cunningly, fashionably, concealed behind teensyweensy cutouts: a flower perhaps, a star, or miniscule carriage and team of horses. Hailspots on modern veiling however, Mr. Nylon warns, can be less specific. Scattered at random on a length of netting, they can mimic moles, blowflies and other icky blots if they happen to fall in the wrong position over the face. But, never fear. “You can move your hailspots to the right spots,” Mr. Nylon says, modelling a fascinating foofnicker on his own shaved head, “See, I’ve got one right in front of my nose here and I don’t want it to look like a big black-head so…” One quick pinch, a flick and it’s off, leaving his veil spotless and infinitely more fetching.
Mr. Nylon’s reputation as a milliner is well known but his pristine comedic timing perhaps less so. “I love torturing feathers,” he says, deadpan. “Now, let me show you how to de-fluff.” This is a crucial millinery lesson. “I don’t like fluff as a general rule, but there are times when fluff is wonderful,” he says wryly. “There are times I can’t get enough of that wonderful fluff.”
By lesson’s end, we each own a new hat/fascinator/headpiece, and a bag of fresh facts about sex organs, black heads and the pox, among others. Whether we will actually wear our inventions to Flemington on Saturday or beyond is probably dependant on how nimble were our fingers, how exuberant our creativity, and whether we were more dedicated to learning or laughing.
My fascinator, I confess, will not see the light of Turnbull Stakes Day unless, between now and then, I scout a pearly white lopsided, slightly misshapen frocklet spangled with mangled feathers to match.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
