THREE vintage products fans will celebrate all things swish in Dunolly next month, writes GENEVIEVE BARLOW

Tiffany Titshall, Monika Roleff and Fiona Lindsay have one great love in common.

They like all things vintage - vintage clothes, vintage architecture, vintage crockery, vintage jewellery and even vintage posters.

They plans to share this interest with the public when they stage the inaugural Art of Elegance Fair, featuring high tea, vintage fashion and collectibles, amid the goldrush buildings of Dunolly in central Victoria next month.

Tiffany, 41, a graphic designer and artist who runs a vintage boutique in nearby Talbot, says about 25 stallholders from central Victoria will offer things vintage from gramophones to travelling ports, jewellery and crockery.

Walls of glamour photography and floral displays are promised.

High tea will be served in the 1880s Dunolly Town Hall and people are encouraged to dress elegantly for the day.

"It's about elegance and the old ways of celebrating that," Tiffany says.

The former Melburnian, whose father was a pattern maker, opened her shop about five years ago, filling it with outfits she had amassed over many years.

"It's a hobby and I'm in a small quiet town so I only open it on market days and on Sundays," she says.

"When I started there weren't so many vintage shops, but they're everywhere now. It's a generational thing.

"Our generation has been collecting stuff and scouring opportunity shops for a while now.

"We grew up with this whole move to plastic going on around us and, with more and more mass production, we are attracted to old and unique things."

Tiffany believes a recent TV screening of Mad Men, about the advertising industry in the 1960s, has tapped that interest.

"It's authentic down to the last stitch of the outfits and suits worn by the actors," she says.

"It's about the decay of the man's world, when women started to take control of their lives."

For Maryborough writer, textiles enthusiast, history enthusiast and blogger Monika Roleff this moment in the 1960s was when women began to shed the repressions of domestic life - but they also shed their feminine side, manifest in "pretty" and elegant outfits.

She believes women now want their "feminine" back, plus the clothes that went with it.

That is what the Art of Elegance Fair is all about, she says.

Dunolly cafe owner and heritage restorer and advocate Fiona Lindsay is mostly interested in the elegance of the town's vintage architecture. She lives in an 1860s Georgian mansion she and her husband restored.

"Really, Dunolly is the most (historically) intact and beautiful old town with a lot of elegant architecture in its old buildings," Fiona says.

She will oversee sittings of high tea, at 2pm and again at 3pm, in the town hall.

"The whole building inside has been restored to its original colour scheme," she says.

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