I’d love to wear a dress and tie to Ascot – but let’s not relax things too much
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At this year’s Royal Ascot, I shall be wearing a dress and tie. I got the idea from a piece in this paper at the weekend, which featured a model in a stunning Laura Green powder-pink dress and navy tie, and was one of the outfits suggested by Royal Ascot’s new lookbook.
Despite having been put together by Royal Ascot’s first creative director, the young British fashion designer Daniel Fletcher, the outfit is likely to cause consternation with some of the older crowd, who would probably rather female racegoers stick to their corsets and crinolines. But ever since Annie Hall, and that fabulous photo of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in matching polka-dot kipper ties, I’ve always wanted to emulate that look.
If you think this signifies a relaxing of the famously stringent dress code, however, you’re wrong. There’s been no loosening up of the rules, not since 2021, when navy morning suits were allowed – and organisers should keep it that way.
At the risk of sounding like an ex-Army major with pronounced rosacea – coincidentally my spirit animal – I think we should stop being apologetic about dress codes. Everywhere you look, as far as the eye can see, clothing rules have been suspended.
It’s now perfectly normal to see women in bras wandering down the canned foods aisle in Waitrose. Men will wear sweatpants and trainers to fancy restaurants across London and every summer I’m forced to read the same piece about how it’s perfectly acceptable to wear flip-flops to the office (it’s not).
There are, maybe, a handful of occasions in modern British life in which women are asked to wear “skirts of modest length” and men suits and ties, and although this always leads to outraged accusations of “outdated institutions”, I say ignore the outrage and revel in being outdated.
Not least because if someone is so hellbent on being up-to-the-minute and cutting-edge, they might not want to spend their day watching a procession of royalty-bearing horse-drawn carriages make their way down a racetrack, as thousands of sauced racegoers bellow out a discordant rendition of God Save The King.
