I LOVE EMIRATES STAKES DAY

Words and photographs: Janice Breen Burns, Voxfrock editor

November is still peppered with country race dates but for most of us, the Spring Racing Carnival finished at today’s Emirates Stakes day. It was cold. It was windy. Fat splats of sideways rain whacked 65,000 punters more than once but despite the blue knuckles and goosebumps, spirits remained as high as the hemlines on hundreds of teen girls who flocked to Flemington for the highlight of their year: Fashions on the Field.

This is the day FOTF traditionally switches from Myer to Emirates, and grownup glamour to kidlet chic. Emirates’ categories of family, junior, senior, boys and girls,  is unique in racing and, by a series of accidental controversies thrashed out in the media over many years, has slowly redefined what is nice – and not – in children’s fashion.

I joined the judges, including the marvelous young Home and Away star Johnny Ruffo, renowned milliner Kim Fletcher, and Herald Sun fashion writer Anna Byrne, for the FOFT family category. More than 40 familial groups; assorted dads and sons, mums and daughters, grans, pops, aunties and uncles, even the odd borrowed tot and baby, queued in the cold for their moment on stage.

Smiles were dazzling (And, why would they not be? “Smile, darling, smiiiiiile!” was glumbled more than once through gritted teeth.) Ensembles were carefully co-ordinated, from jolly shamozzles with one linking colour between mum, dad and up to four kidlets, to a full familial choir of Von-Trappish matches. (Google Sound of Music if that puzzles.)

Boys strutted, girls posed, mums coaxed, dads went along, glamourously attired babies squirmed for nappy changes. The precosious precoshed, the shy shied, the butterflies fashionably flitted. One poppet jammed her full brimmed hat over her face and refused to budge it, even as she was twirled blindly on stage with her smiling, but exasperated mum.

Judging was fraught. Hilarious. Gorgeous. Nerve-wracking. (How to bear the stiff-upper-lipped smiles of the rejected? Cowardly sunglasses.) Eventually, we whittled the field down to the winning Worrels of McCrae, in blues and pinks and charcoal. Steve and Dee Worrell had mustered their grandchildren, the heart-stoppingly cute Hudson, 5, and Willow, 2, as a last minute lark that got serious, and seriouser. “The blues started coming together first,” said their daughter and the kidlets’ mum, Tegan Worrell. Then came the pinks and the millinery; a tiny pillbox cocktail hat by Karla Murley for Willow, and a Felicity Northeast extravaganza in blue for granny Dee, and smoke-grey tailoring for papa Steve. “All the outfits came together in a week…,” confided Ms. Worrell. Thrilled doesn’t cover the family’s joy when their win was announced and a pair of elegant Emirates flight attendants moved in to flank the obligatory media snaps.

Joy is a fixture of Emirates Stakes Day. The core categories of FOTF ensure it, as fleets of excited children take over the trackside lawns. Swaggering boys in ill-fitting suits, gaggles of teen girls in breathtakingly short knicker-flash frocklets, bare faux-tanned legs, and brick-high platform shoes. Totter, totter, totter. They totter stiffly on their unfamiliar new shoes. I imagined any punter over the age of 25 could only be amused, or bewildered, or scornful (yes, there are a witheringly rude few).

This trinity of knicker-flasher, bare-faux-tan legs and brick-highs, is a sartorial anomaly peculiar to the young who simply totter on, blissfully obliviously clamping windblown frocklets down over g-strings and goosebumpy thighs. As they should. Chutzpah belongs to the young.

Me, I escaped, after the core business of FOTF was done, to the glamourous warmth of the Emirates marquee. Such beauty, so swank! All that’s exotic and wonderful about Dubai, with henna tattoes, foot massages, chandeliers, five-star menu and traditional dancers and music thrown in. Incomparable. Except, for the glorious spectacle, tottering, swaggering on the lawns outside. I ate, downed a flute (Mumm, natch) and rejoined the tottering throngs outside.

I love Emirates Stakes Day.

(Pictured, my hat by Phillip Rhodes, spring coat by Alexi Freeman, black silk sheath by Feathers.)