A Fashionable Day at the Races – Leave your hat on

Christchurch Casino New Zealand Trotting Cup Day is at Addington Raceway this Tuesday 13 November. Cup Day is known for FASHUN too:

Fashionistas get their chance to shine during the glamorous Westfield Riccarton Style Stakes Fashion and The Hits Body Art competitions.

Here is some last minute Cup Day fashion inspo, with a focus on hats, fascinators, titfers, and millinery:

Bill Cunningham – famed as a New York street fashion photographer as featured in doco Bill Cunningham New York – first found fame as a designer of ultra-arty and outlandish hats under the alias William J. His memoir Fashion Climbing: A New York Life has lots of juicy hat stuff.

And of course, if you are looking for a contemporary hat goddess, you can’t go past the much-missed Isabella Blow.

LOVE this hat and veil combo worn by Adut Akech on the cover of British Vogue’s December issue (coming soon to RBDigital Magazines for your reading/viewing pleasure)

Adut Akech covers our December 2018 issue, hitting newsstand this Friday – photographed by Steven Meisel & styled by @Edward_Enninful. Celebrating Edward Enninful’s 1 year anniversary at the magazine, Vogue has released 4 very special covers #1YearNewVogue https://t.co/Svyr9aXM8B pic.twitter.com/R576xcloga

— British Vogue (@BritishVogue) November 5, 2018

You don’t even have to visit a library to get ideas. We have eMagazines as well as magazines in print. RBDigital and PressReader feature a range of fashion eMagazines, online magazines and newspapers including Vogue Australia, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and more.

And how some historical inspiration – this stylish trio rocked Addington in the 1930s.

Three friends at Addington races, late 1930s. Source: Entry in the 2013 Christchurch City Libraries Photo Hunt by Pip Joyce. Discovery Wall CCL-PH13-259

More fashion

• Find more Hats in our collection.
• Fashion
• New Zealand fashion

Hats r us

I’m wearing a hat of sorts today, and you see more be-hatted types on the streets this chilly winter. Once they were a daily necessity, but now it seems the races and weddings are their turf.  The most glamorous international outing for hats is Ascot which took place last week and The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker gave headgear a right royal drubbing:

Every year it’s the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you’ve never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that’s been soaked in tea for the past eight decades … balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum on her head …

If you know your Homburg from your fascinator (or want to), check out our books about hats and millinery.