Fashion victim

I had an email from son Ben the other day: “Naughty Woman is famous.”

Naughty Woman has been a part of my family since the early 70s when, in a sudden attack of altruism, I saved her life. She was down on her luck. The business where she worked – a Wellington milliner’s – had closed down thanks to changing fashion.

I could relate to that. When I first started work, I’d gone along to weekly millinery classes at a local high school with some girlfriends. We learned the gentle art of snipping, sewing, steaming and moulding felt bases into works of art. We wired the brims, embellished the shapes with feathers and fabric and flowers, stitched in headbands and were soon turning out masterpieces for friends and family.

I’d sit on buses studying the hats around me, getting ideas. I invested in my own wooden milliner’s block where I could work on my current project. Mum started wearing my new creations out and about. I remodelled some of my Nana’s hats.

The classes ended but I continued making hats – for a while. Then fickle fashion changed. Hats were out, hair was in. Instead of covering our tresses, we exploited them, grew them, teased them into Beehives, or rolled them into large curls and pinned them carefully in place.

There was no place on our towering hair for hats. And milliners were going out of business. And that’s when I met Naughty Woman. I was trotting down Willis Street to work when I noticed Gamages hat shop was having a closing-down sale. I couldn’t help myself. I went in for a look and there she was, perched on a bench, a resigned faraway look in her eye – and jobless. What would it take to save her after her many years of service? “Two dollars,” I was told. I paid my money and tucked the milliner’s dummy under my arm.

I took her back to my office and installed her in the top tier of my In, Out and Procrastinate trays. She was christened Hortense after Hortense de Lanvin. The latter was a shop manikin that was being flown first class round the world at the time to publicise the House of Lanvin.

When I left work to have my first baby, Hortense came home with me. She ended up on a shelf in the wardrobe.

A few years later, when my sons were looking for “dress-ups”, they found her and soon had her decked out in my mother’s old silver fox fur – one of those ones complete with foxhead, beady glass eyes and dangling, boneless legs.

“We’re playing with Naughty Woman,” they told me, as they tried on my old clothes and the discarded Sydney wigs. I have no idea how they arrived at that name, but it stuck and Naughty Woman is still with us.

Her guest appearance on my last blog prompted the email from Ben. Naughty Woman proved an obliging prop and I’m tempted to invite her back from time to time, particularly with racing's Spring Carnival coming up.

Naughty Woman's timely fashion tip: To revive the artificial flowers on a hat or fascinator, hold them carefully over a boiling kettle spout for a few seconds and the steam will perk up the petals.