Milliner Tamasine Dale is back in business
After a decades-long hiatus, Melbourne’s high society hat maker is back and brimming with inspiration.
It’s a balmy spring evening in Melbourne as a selection of the city’s most stylish file into the Matisse-red salon rooms of fashion emporium Christine to witness the figurative lid lifted on a trunk show of Tamasine Dale millinery. The turnout is telling, a mark of the city’s regard for Dale’s artistry and her epic hiatus from design – which, she will later point out, has never ceased. Rather, she scaled down from branded business to an off-the-radar continuum of commissions as she raised a family and completed a fine arts degree. The crowd is keen to hear the “why” of it all, and to again wear the hand-made hats that walk the line between wistful romanticism and barricade-storming rebellion – a sculpted wantonness first seeded in the club scene and DIY fashion culture of late 1980s Melbourne.
“Her style is both timeless and of a time,” eulogises Christine Barro, the host-store’s owner, who presided over the era’s dance-floor epicentre Inflation and first launched Dale’s millinery into the luxury orbit of the late Georges of Collins Street department store. “Such great memories of the ’80s, and so special to go full circle and a few blocks up to relaunch Tamasine at Christine on Collins. There is a rightful symmetry to it all at a time when design is again rebelling and retelling.”
This story appears in the December issue of WISH Magazine, on sale Friday December 1 with The Australian.
Dale, a petite flaxen blond in her 50s, freshly bronzed by the Aegean sun after a stay in her holiday digs on a Greek island in the Dodecanese, responds with thanks and a reference to the thinking behind hats that are collectively doffed to the celebrated American novelist Truman Capote. “The relaunch of my millinery label is a very personal journey,” she says to a crowd well versed in her trajectory, from cracking a Vogue cover at 20 to exhibiting at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and then peak fade as her then husband Gary Theodore’s fashion label Scanlan Theodore rose. Her departure from the firmament, she says, was self-determined, but rather than labour the past, she talks about the current dearth of good “everyday” millinery.
“There were hats either suited to the beach or the races, but nothing in between,” she says of her search for cool, quotidian head cover. “Friends complained about the same problem and urged me to resume making hats. They said, ‘no one makes hats like you used to – please do a collection’.”
There’s a nod of accord as Dale addresses the specifics of a launch collection coloured by a drift of soigneé 20th-century Swans – the haute New York society ilk of Barbara “Babe” Paley, C.Z. Guest (wife of steel heir Winston Guest), and Lee Radziwill (former princess and sister to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) – who became the trusted friends, turned literary fodder, of Capote in the 1960s and ’70s. Capote celebrated the success of his Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood by throwing the legendary Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 – a precursor to the Met Gala that made society dames do their worst to secure an invitation.
The acerbic author was also famous for his friendship with writer Harper Lee, whose mid-century masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird concealed her childhood playmate Capote in the character of Charles Baker “Dill” Harris, a puny boy obsessed with drawing Boo Radley out of hiding. Where Lee won the Pulitzer and would become a virtual recluse, Capote coveted the honour and aggressively courted celebrity, compensating for his diminutive stature with diamond-sharp words and the warm embrace of the world’s most beautiful women.
“He was only 5 foot 3 inches,” says Dale, tilting the lofty Truman hat, so-called for its hyperbolic crown, on the head of Christine house-model Anthea Crebbin. “It is designed to add some extra height and serves as a great store for my scrunched-up hair in the heat of summer.” The Harper, “like its counterpart, is designed to be the perfect everyday hat”, she continues, showing a fine straw fedora featuring a standard crown and a knotted antique ribbon “found in France”. In contrast, the voluptuous Babe, Dale’s face-framing homage to former US Vogue fashion editor Barbara Paley, blends upturned Waspish conservatism with a wide Petersham bow redolent of 1980s New Romanticism. Its sweeping brim alludes to Paley’s wide social reach and desire to excise Capote from her circle of confidantes after the author part-released his planned roman à clef Answered Prayers in Esquire magazine in 1975.
It was a malicious exposé of the milieu Capote moved in, thinly veiling the lives of his Swans and all their sordid mating rituals. “Imagination, of course, can open any door,” he famously quipped of his easy entrée into their rarefied atmosphere. “Turn the key and let terror walk right in.” But haute society summarily dumped the little terror who, like Icarus, dared to fly too close to the sun and swan-dived into the drink. The story is soon to hit the small screen in Ryan Murphy’s new series Feud: Capote’s Women, starring Naomi Watts as Babe Paley.
None of Dale’s stitched-in subtext is lost on Katie Somerville, senior curator of fashion and textiles at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), who later credits the milliner’s deft interplay of materials and bygone palettes as a Proustian pullback to things past. “It might be the braid, or a type of ribbon used, but there is always a time travel element to her hats,” she says. “They are quite compelling in that way.” She cites seven Dale exemplars in the NGV’s collection – shapes running the gamut from ’80s “cinematic” romanticism to ’90s monastic minimalism – remarking on the continuum of narrative and a “very conscious naming” that ascribes identities to overarching ideas.
It’s a practice evident in the new collection’s Tadzio, a semi-formal boater named after the preternaturally beautiful Polish boy at the centre of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a story soaked in the decay of bourgeois values that has resonance in the here and now.
Somerville believes Dale’s poetic critiques on cultural decline began in “the gloriously anti-establishment, heady days of the Fashion Design Council [FDC]”, when Melbourne’s club-driven creative culture centred on Stalbridge Chambers and coalesced in extraordinary runway shows. “Her connection with millinery wasn’t about the typical Melbourne race day narrative at all. It was a youthquake at the intersection of art, music, film, photography and clubs, almost working in spite of the tradition of the hat to generate a new tradition. That’s what’s interesting about Dale. She is a deep thinker.”
But what is the wellspring of such beautifully constructed contemplations? WISH visited the master milliner at her South Yarra home – a Queen Anne gem surrounded by impressionist swathes of garden. “I’m a country girl who grew up in Castlemaine,” she explains, adding that she recently bought a heritage weekender in the same street in Central Victoria where she grew up. “Both my parents are architects, but they separated when I was seven, leaving my mother to raise four children and transition to teaching as a way of looking after us. We lived the alternative life, always off on the hippy trails in a yellow Kombi-van, holidaying under geodesic domes in the wild.”
She describes a blissful ignorance of economic realities when, as an enterprising six-year-old, she styled her bedroom into a selling gallery of Tamasine-signed art; bred guinea pigs to generate coinage for craft supplies; and took her pony to the Saturday market for paying rides. It was an early immersion in creativity, she observes. She remembers her adult pragmatism peaking at 15 at Castlemaine Technical College – “woodwork, machine shop, and home economics with 17 boys” – and her academic shortcomings being found out at St. Michael’s Grammar School in Melbourne, where she was enrolled to complete year 11 and 12 and “it was embarrassingly revealed” that she’d never written an essay. She started work at the Pascoe Vale branch of the Bank of NSW three days after her last exam. “It gave me a good work ethic, a vital grounding in accounting,” and a proximity to the Melbourne College of Textiles. She started night classes in patternmaking, peddling her output at New Icons in Prahran and at Camberwell market.
A working holiday through Europe ended in squatter’s digs in London in the late 1980s as the legendary Blitz Night Club birthed New Romanticism and Boy George, and brought a rebellious new cred to headwear. Dale recalls following a queue in Covent Garden to the door of nascent hatmaker Stephen Jones and not knowing what “milliner” meant. “But I came back to Melbourne determined to be one,” she says, “re-enrolling in night classes and meeting Bob Buckingham [co-founder of the FDC] in Stalbridge Chambers to find out how I could have a runway show.”
Buckingham, along with graphic designer Robert Pearce and artist Kate Durham, re-dressed polite Melbourne fashion as the realm of radical possibility in parades that made a star of such precocious talent as Martin Grant. He bounced from its runways right into early ’90s Paris and the patronage of the late US Vogue editor-at-large André Leon Talley, as well as Capote Swan Lee Radziwill. Dale recalls her first encounter with wunderkind Grant as a happy postscript to her pow-wow with Buckingham, who advised her that if she wanted to show with the FDC she had to team with a designer. “I left that meeting a little discouraged and descended in the Stalbridge lift, which jolted to a halt on the fourth floor as Martin stepped in. He eyeballed my boxes, asked to look inside, and rode us both back up to his studio for the start of a great friendship and fashion collaboration.”
Grant is sketchy on the detail when later Zooming in from his holiday base in the South of France. “It was in the thick of nightclub days,” he says, but recalls “my work just gelled with what she was doing,” referring to their mutual correspondence with a very feminine classicism. “We were both such babies, but being able to work on the same ideas across different materials was just incredible at the time.”
Nearly 40 years later and not much has changed, notes Grant of Dale’s “summer sun on wheat” way of working culture and character into the deceptively simple likes of the Lee – a cross between a cloche and a bucket hat that encodes Radziwill’s ready-for-anything chic in foldable Panama straw and Picot ribbon trim.
Dale had earlier dished on her memory of being invited by Grant one summer to sail from Marseille to Corsica and being joined by Radziwill, who insisted on “winging her way out for a five-hour hair appointment with Alexandre de Paris” – the preferred maître coiffeur of Elizabeth Taylor. “Lee flew straight back with this enormous beehive, lacquered to perfection,” recalls Dale. “She just got back on the boat, dived straight into the water and resurfaced with Alexandre’s artistry dripping down her face.”
Grant, divulges that Radziwill often bemoaned the years wasted both sitting in the hairdresser’s chair and suffering the late-stage Capote who, though shunned by New York society, remained, supported by Radziwill until his perpetual state of drugged stupefaction incurred “the call for a helicopter to come fly him out of her holidays”.
But you can read it all in the hats, adds Grant of Dale’s subtexted lyrical structures – the abstract roofing on the early parental architecture. “They are not entertainments but virtual auras, just for walking around in the world and being beautiful.”
This story appears in the December issue of WISH Magazine, on sale Friday December 1.
