If you’re going to Royal Ascot in a couple of weeks, should you go in fancy dress? I only ask because, in April, the official Royal Ascot Instagram account dropped a video featuring a cowboy in a vibrant cowboy suit and glittery boots.
‘Ascot presents The Ascot You,’ declares the video, before the cowboy struts his way around Piccadilly Circus and admires himself in a Lillywhites window, accompanied by a suitably Once Upon A Time In The West soundtrack.
It’s a spiffy suit and he looks very Dallas, but I’m not entirely sure you’d get into Ascot wearing it.
Certainly not into the Royal Enclosure, where fancy dress isn’t allowed. According to Ascot’s website, ‘customised top hats (with, for example, coloured ribbons, feathers or embellishments)’ aren’t allowed either.
In other words, if you went to all the trouble of dressing up like the cowboy in this year’s advert for Ascot and then tried to get into the event wearing a hat decorated with rhinestones, you may well be turned away. Which would be jolly annoying because the badge to get into the Royal enclosure this year costs £195.
I was alerted to the cowboy situation by a disgruntled fashion stylist. ‘I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently with milliners, especially about their biggest week of the year and how orders are down,’ she told me. ‘Clients are confused about what to wear and there’s a feeling that Ascot is moving in a very different direction.’
This year, for the first time ever, Ascot has appointed a creative director, a chap called Daniel Fletcher and a successful young fashion designer who’s dressed the likes of Harry Styles, Nick Jonas and Emma Corrin.
In March, Daniel unveiled this year’s look-book, with suggestions for outfits for the various enclosures.
The cover features two women in dresses, hats and polka-dot ties; inside a woman wears a dress made by a hot new label, Chopova Lowena, which seems to come with bondage straps over its chest, and a man wears a tweed suit made by Daniel Fletcher himself, under the heading ‘Grandpacore’.
You’re a Telegraph reader and may well be a grandfather, but in case you’ve missed this 2024 trend, ‘grandpacore’ means wearing old knits, high-waisted trousers and perhaps a pair of spectacles.
Maybe you’re wearing them all right now to read this piece, in which case, congratulations. You’ve accidentally nailed one of the year’s biggest looks.
There are some terrific hats in the look-book, and models in vintage Hermes scarves and hired hats to make the point that you don’t need to buy a whole new outfit.
‘Can you work with the pieces in your wardrobe to create a new Royal Ascot look or take your Mum’s old prom dress and have it tailored to be dress-code ready?’ writes Daniel at the beginning of the sustainable section.
I would hazard a guess that a good number of people at Ascot, at least in the Royal Enclosure, don’t absolutely know what a prom is. But I could ask my mum all the same.
Ascot’s attempts to attract a younger following have caused a bit of a fuss, though, and traditionalists are unhappy. ‘All this “be who you want to be” woke stuff,’ one tells me. ‘If you want to be who you want to be, then don’t go to Ascot and celebrate the Royal family.’
A milliner points out to me, with what sounds like genuine disgust, that there are ‘men with sweaters’ in the look-book, as if wearing a sweater to the racecourse marks you out as some sort of pervert.
‘The style guide is confused, done by someone who doesn’t understand the tradition,’ the milliner goes on. ‘I despair!’ declares the stylist.
Should Royal Ascot adapt or not? For a few years now, it’s been having a go. In 2017 it declared that women could wear jumpsuits in the Royal enclosure; in 2021, the big news was that men could wear navy morning suits, instead of black or grey. Steady the buffs, and so on.
You may have seen some of the adverts for the week this year proclaiming ‘There’s you. And then there’s the Ascot you.’ In one, a woman wears a floor-length dress in a laundrette. In another, a man in tails and a top hat holds a fork in an allotment.
A tiny bit patronising, perhaps, to stick models dressed for Ascot in locations like a laundrette and an allotment – but you can see what they’re trying to do. It’s not just for the toffs, is their point. Anyone can go to Ascot.
I went last year in an electric pink trouser suit and a Panama hat, but I turned the invitation down this year. Not because I’m appalled by the look-book; simply because I didn’t enjoy it. It was an extremely kind invitation from some very kind friends and we had a lovely lunch in the carpark, but the 10.47 from Clapham Junction was a highly unsanitary experience, the race course was too crowded, we barely looked at a horse, and to get back on the train again we were held in queuing pens, and nothing quite takes the glamour off a day like being kettled at the end of it.
Racecourses need to make money, like everyone else these days. But should Royal Ascot try harder to maintain standards? The King and Queen are expected to go this year, after all. Should Camilla wear a bondage dress?
Quite a few friends I quiz say they don’t bother with the week anymore, that it’s changed in the last decade or so and become like many other race meetings – too boozy, too crowded, too uninterested in horses.
An Australian racing fan suggests that the focus on style and fashion is a possible attempt to distract from horse casualties on the track, to try and shore up the future of the scene when the sport is under flack for being cruel. Down Under, she says, race meets are now called carnivals and as much about clothes and headline musical acts as racing.
Might that be the future here? We’ll see. But best of luck if you’re going in a couple of weeks, and don’t despair if you’re stuck for a hat.
A Stetson might just do the trick. You can say you saw it on their Instagram.
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