Hats Made from Hair, The World’s Most Fashion-Conscious Horse and a Delicious (and drinkable) Milk Hat: Just Another Day at Royal Ascot.
I am a fashionista, socialite and connoisseur of style, and Royal Ascot is my spiritual home. The air throbs with glamour, style and joie de vivre here at the peak of the summer social circuit. I feel at home, among the eccentric, the exotic and the effervescent.
With the world’s greatest milliners seeking to showcase their creations, each year eclipses the last. And this year’s Ladies Day promises some spectacular hat surprises.
I joined the regal and the royal, on the 16th July 2011, to celebrate 300 years of fabulous hats, high society and horses. I came to enjoy the stylish company, and exhilarating races and to answer the all-important question on everyone’s lips...who had the best hat?
Ascot was once again transformed into a sea of weird and wonderful hats and colours like a dazzling array of peacocks, ranging from the bizarre to the beautiful, each prepared to go to any extreme to out-shine the other. It is a porthole into a world of glamour, gossip and shameless self-promotion.
On the first day, Princess Beatrice looked stunning, arriving in horse-drawn carriage among the cigars, brass bands and fashionable frivolity.
The first surprise was Ascot’s first ever hat created for a horse! A hat modelled on Audrey Hepburn’s My Fair Lady, for a particularly risque and fashion-conscious horse named Amber.
The milliners were going all-out this year to make the most impressive hats from the most unusual materials. One hat was entirely composed of fake hair and cabbage roses, while a spectacular and rather unwieldy two-foot creation was made of blonde hair and pink and green roses. Poor hat model Anneka Tanneka Svenska was barely able to keep it upright, despite being a trained ballerina!
But Ladies Day had an even greater style surprise in store this year, with Ascot’s first drinkable hat.
The revolutionary headpiece, the brainchild of world-renowned milliner Judy Bentinck in association with Lakeland Dairies, managed to achieve the unthinkable and outdo Ascot’s most fine-plumed attention-seekers.
Aimee Nazroo, an up-and-coming glamour model and fashion queen tipped for future stardom, shone among the fashion-conscious crowds, in her wonderful hat, complimented with a subtly stylish, cutting-edge milk-silk and satin dress, to continue the milk theme.
Miss Nazroo’s hat, composed of an intricately-layered mesh, was wrapped in satin and highly sought-after “milk silk”, a soft and luxurious material so rare that only two companies in the world have ever made it. The hat was designed to replicate one of sophisticated new glamour-milk brand Modern Milk’s cartons.
But there was more to this hat than meets the eye.
Curious race-goers swarming around the unusual spectacle discovered this particular milk hat was drinkable, and this wasn’t just any milk, but (in-keeping with the occasion), slightly unusual, and a little exotic, with just a dash of sophistication.
In bizarre scenes, a beautiful women was photographed topping up her glass for a refreshing drink poured from a hidden tube connected to a pump inside the hat, from which flowed the luxurious flavoured milk clearly aimed at the healthy, stylish and sophisticated drinker; low-fat milk ripe strawberry and raspberry, gave an unusually healthy flavour to an Ascot famed for champagne and cigars. If there were an award for Greatest Hat 2011, it would surely go to the Milk Hat.
From the truly weird to the truly wonderful, I thought I had seen everything at Royal Ascot. But glamour and milk in the same sentence? And even in the same hat?
Once upon a time people came here for the horses; now they come for the hats; and even the horses have got in on the act. Let’s see if next year’s millinery extravagance can top 2011. See you there.
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