What to Wear to Cheltenham Festival — Without Looking Like Everyone Else

Cheltenham Festival has a look. You will know it when you see it — and if you have been to Prestbury Park in March, you will have seen a great deal of it. Tweed, lots of it — and most of it worn in one particular way: the military-inspired coat with the gold buttons and frogging and épaulettes and the belted waist. Repeated, in minor variations, across several thousand women across four days, until the overall effect is less country chic than am-dram production of a Jilly Cooper novel.

This is not an accident. It is the result of very successful brand building by a small number of 'country lifestyle' labels who have, over the past decade or so, defined the Cheltenham aesthetic so thoroughly that dressing for the festival has come to mean dressing in their image. The result is a crowd that is recognisable at 100 metres.

The military coat deserves particular attention. It is everywhere at Cheltenham — frogged, braided, buttoned to the throat, épauletted, belted oh-so-tightly and structured to within an inch of its life. It is also doing few favours to many of the women that wear it. This is a silhouette designed for a slim, straight frame — ideally one that is also approximately six feet tall and has the proportions and deportment of a cavalry officer. On anyone else it shortens, widens and adds a rigidity that has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with costume. Combined with a pair of equestrian boots and a feathered trilby, the pantomime is complete.

Almost that is, because there is also the question of the gold buttons. There are a great many gold buttons at Cheltenham. And gold zips. And gold hardware of various kinds, applied liberally to coats, bags, belts and boots in a way that reads, in aggregate, as rather less restrained than the country house aesthetic these wearers are presumably intending to evoke. Cheltenham in March is not a subtle event. But it could be.

A coat that is actually well cut — in a fine tweed or a wool bouclé, in an A-line or a comfortable cocoon silhouette rather than a militaristic column — will look more at home in the countryside than anything with frogging on it. It will also work for a wider range of figures, because a coat that drapes rather than constricts does not require its wearer to have the proportions of a jockey. And it will be worn, after the last race on Gold Cup day, somewhere other than a racecourse — because it was not designed exclusively for racecourses.

At EdNerat we make coats in tweed, flannel and bouclé that are cut for real women rather than for a brand aesthetic. Country coats you might call them — but with no frogging, no épaulettes and no gold buttons. Just beautifully made coats, handmade in London, that will serve you at Cheltenham and everywhere else besides. See our country coat collection here.

The racecourse is not a costume drama. You don't have to dress as though it is.