Inside the red brick building of the Jamaican High Commission on Prince Consort Road in London the search is on for a mas woman. T&T Guardian has arranged to meet Melissa Simon-Hartman here, the principal designer of the Notting Hill Carnival band, Elimu. She's been invited to show three of her 2015 Carnival costumes at a launch event for a new British TV programme about the Caribbean.
She shouldn't be too hard to spot; in photos she looks futuristically fashionable with her closely cropped hair dyed silver, thick-rimmed designer spectacles, majestic jewelry and figure-hugging dresses. But she's definitely not here among this crowd of networkers from the entertainment industry.
But away from the melee, in a calm room there are three models in front of a floor-to-ceilingmirror dressed in gold stretch lam� costumes with majestic head pieces, shimmering winged capes, golden neck-discs two feet in diameter, long pheasant feather plumage thrusting out of shoulder pads and giant circular back packs. Their faces are tattooed around the eyes and in the centre of this hushed scene Simon-Hartman is calmly decorating their faces with gold leaf make-up.
The creations are equal parts regal queens and warrior princesses. There are nods to matriarchal leaders like Boadicea as well as the narcissism of Queen Nefertiti and ancient Egypt's pharaohs–the models look as though they could have walked straight off the set of the 1934 Hollywood film Cleopatra.
As the finishing touches are applied, the doors suddenly burst open."We need you out here now!" shouts one of the TV station organisers and the chaos sucks everybody back into the main room and the models are swallowed up in the mayhem.
Some days later I am talking to Simon-Hartman on the phone from her home-cum-studio in Bedford, the county town of Bedfordshire, a sleepy place that's not really famous for anything except Luton Town FC who won the League Cup in 1988 beating the favourites Arsenal.
It's about as far removed from the heat and excitement of Trinidad as it's possible to be and there's a wonderful juxtaposition between this modest quintessentially English place where the costumes are being created and the raucousness of where they will be worn on the parade route passing through hundreds of thousands of people thronging the west London streets of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove.
Simon-Hartman, who is originally from Queens Park and Kilburn in North West London sees the funny side too. Not long after our interview she posts pictures of herself in her back garden battling against the wind and rain to spray dozens of costumes while her two-year-old daughter ran around screaming. This is a mas-camp with a very domestic British feel.
She explains that the gold costumes on show at the High Commission are the front, mid and back line of the Pride section. The theme of her mas is the seven deadly sins though she's quick to explain that there was no biblical intent behind it, instead she takes most of her inspiration from folklore from around the world and from fantasy (not the T&T Carnival band) including characters from the Japanese manga genre, anime films and illustrations by artists like Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell.
Her two main sections are Pride and Wrath and she has made individual costumes for Envy and Gluttony as well as the individual King and Queen costumes which represent Greed and Sloth respectively.
While Pride is glitzy and hints at masked balls as well as the Egyptian sun gods, Wrath features stunning pseudo-satanic, black, chrome and red women's costumes called La Diablesse. There's more than a hint of traditional Japanese operatic theatre designs with large elaborate headdresses and wigs. The men's costumes in the Wrath section are called Papa Bois and have an African or Pacific Islander feel–long-horned helmets and totemic headdresses–as well as a nod to the Viking mask Bunji Garlin wore in the Differentology video.
She uses a large cast of models including the wife of Elimu's band consultant Ansel Wong and the niece of the band leader Tony Charles.
Elimu has appeared at every Notting Hill Carnival since 1981 but this year Simon-Hartman has surfaced a new sub-brand and called the band Resurrection. It's a band of about 100 people and she promises to deliver a Carnival experience never before seen in Britain. She's determined to take Carnival back to its roots and takes inspiration from the mas men of the past.
On her band Web site a quote from Peter Minshall decries what Carnival has become: "We are collectively stuck in a rut and sinking fast and furious as a participant in a bland museum diorama of Africa, passing by without the rousing heartbeat of a single drum or the earth ever once being thunderously stamped into submission."
Simon-Hartman is an alumnus of the London College of Fashion where she studied theatrical costume interpretation, fine arts, drawing, millinery, corsetry and even learnt how to make prosthetic masks and tutus for the Royal Ballet and costumes for the horseman at the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002.
Her family on her mother's side are from Maracas-St Joseph and her father, who died when she was six years old, was Ghanaian. She began playing mas with Elimu at eight years old as the Junior Queen and describes the band as being "like another family." At Trinidad Carnival she played mas with Poison as an adult but she laughs when she looks back at that decision now. Her artistic sensibilities mean that she, like Minshall, mourns the death of mas making.
At Notting Hill Carnival the mas parade is hardly even seen among the Red Stripe–swilling, spliff-smoking hordes who are there for the dancehall, reggae and to throw bottles at policeman when the sun goes down.Simon-Hartman tells me the best place to view the parade is at the spot where there used to be a judging point. "They still have a seating area there but it's no longer a competition."
I ask whether the parade itself is in decline and she says, "The thing is there have always been those people who go just for the sound systems, that hasn't changed. But the costumes among the bands that go out have become a bit weak now there's no element of competition. A lot of them have become repetitive as there's no desire to win anything or be better than any other band. So it's become a money making commercial thing."
"Beads and feathers are cheap to buy from China, for four times cheaper than here, so the emphasis is no longer about putting theatre on the road or the theatrics of mas, it's more about bands profiting."It's less expensive to play mas in London than in Trinidad but there are now all-inclusive bands offering a Carnival "experience" not just a costume.
Of the costumes Resurrection are selling–and most sections have now sold out–the front lines cost �300 while the individual costumes are �450. Backline costumes start at �150.So why is she doing it?
"My focus is to pay homage to the past," she says. "My influence is Peter Minshall obviously, I have to mention Minshall, and Brian Macfarlane. They brought theatre to the streets and that's the sort of designer I am. But I think Resurrection represents the past the present and the future. If you look at Minshall's Mancrab, if that came out now it would still be seen as futuristic and that came out in the 80s."
She thinks prosthetics should be used in carnival because "when you're playing mas you're taking on an alter ego, you should become the costume, so I'd like to incorporate cosmetic make-up."
And her ambitions stretch beyond the concrete jungle of London. "Resurrection is part of a two-year plan to embark to Trinidad and launch out there with a tribute to the masters. I'm not going to compromise my desire to tell a story just to look sexy, I believe you can be sexy and still tell a story."