There is one day a year when the whole of Melbourne dresses up at once, and this year it lands on Tuesday 3 November.
Lexus Melbourne Cup Day at Flemington sits in the middle of a four day carnival: Derby Day on Saturday 31 October, the Cup on the Tuesday, Oaks Day on Thursday 5 November, and Stakes Day on Saturday 7 November.
I have been dressing women for Melbourne spring for fourteen years, and the same three questions come up every single October. Do I need a hat. What are the actual rules. Why did my shoes ruin the day.
Here are the answers.
The most famous Cup outfit was a scandal
Worth knowing, because it is still the best styling lesson the carnival has produced.
On Derby Day in 1965, the English model Jean Shrimpton arrived at Flemington in a plain white shift with the hem four inches above the knee, and no hat, no gloves and no stockings. The room went silent. For the first time since 1861 the winning horse was knocked off the front pages, in favour of a discussion about a hemline.
What people forget is that she was not being provocative. Her dressmaker had run short of fabric, so the hem came up.
The reason it worked, and the reason we still talk about it sixty years later, is that she looked entirely like herself in a field of women dressed like each other. That is the whole brief for a race day, and it has not changed.
First: which part of the course is your ticket for?
This is the question to settle before you buy a single thing, because Flemington has two completely different standards operating on the same lawn.
The Members Enclosure has real, published, enforced dress regulations. For women, the VRC rules rule out short playsuits and jumpsuits, shorts or short suits above the knee, and anything exposing the midriff, bralettes and bandeau crop tops included. Joggers, sports shoes and thongs are out. So are denim jackets and bomber jackets. For men it is a suit or tailored trousers with a collared shirt, a tie and proper shoes.
General Admission has no dress code at all. Not a relaxed one. None.
In practice almost everyone in the general areas dresses up anyway, because that is the fun of it. But knowing which set you are in tells you how much rope you have, and it is worth checking your ticket rather than assuming.
The hat question, answered
No, you do not have to wear a hat.
There is no rule requiring headwear at Flemington. Not in the Members Enclosure, not anywhere. Millinery is a very strong convention, and it is lovely, and it photographs beautifully. It is not compulsory.
I say this every year because I watch women spend two hundred dollars on a fascinator they do not suit, then spend the whole day aware of it. If a hat suits you, wear a good one. If it does not, wear excellent earrings and hold your head up. Jean Shrimpton did exactly that and it made the front page.
If you do wear one, the practical bit nobody mentions: put it on with your hair done, in front of a mirror, a week before. Fascinators need to be anchored, and the Flemington lawn catches a breeze.
The shoes decide your day
I am putting this third because it is the mistake that ruins the most race days, and it has nothing to do with fashion.
Flemington is a lawn. A stiletto sinks straight into it. You will spend the afternoon walking on your toes, or barefoot on wet grass holding your shoes, which is not the photograph anybody wants.
A wedge or a block heel spreads your weight and stays on the surface. You get the height, you keep the line, and you last the whole card. I went through the full case for this in the spring trends post, because Melbourne’s entire spring event calendar happens on grass.
Two more things. Wear them around the house first, on carpet, for an hour. And remember you are on your feet from about eleven in the morning until the trams stop being civilised.
Dress for a Melbourne spring, not for the photograph
The other thing that catches people out is our weather.
A Melbourne spring day commonly runs from about ten degrees in the morning to twenty-one in the afternoon, and November is perfectly capable of delivering both a sunburn and a downpour between races. Dressing for the forecast at noon is how people end up shivering by the fourth race.
So build the outfit with a layer that belongs to it. Not a coat you resent carrying, but a jacket, a wrap or a tailored blazer that looks deliberate over the top and looks fine hooked over your arm.
That skirt was twenty dollars from Valleygirl and the lace top fifteen, and the jacket is doing the real work: it makes the outfit look assembled and it comes off the moment the sun arrives.
Cup Day is the colour day
The carnival has an unwritten colour system, and it is genuinely useful to know.
Derby Day is black and white. It is the most rigid convention of the four days and it is beautiful when a whole lawn commits to it.
Cup Day is the colour day. This is the one to wear a proper shade on.
Oaks Day leans feminine, floral and softer.
Stakes Day is the family day and relaxes considerably.
So for the Cup itself, wear a colour. A real one, not a beige. But choose it by what suits your own colouring rather than by what the shops are pushing this season, which is the whole argument in the best colours for your skin tone. A woman in the right red looks extraordinary at Flemington. The same woman in this year’s fashionable sage can look like she is recovering from something.
What actually works, shape by shape
A shift or an A-line dress is the safest thing you can wear to the races and it always has been. It skims, it copes with a long lunch, and it photographs from every angle.
A midi with movement is the most flattering option on most bodies and it handles wind better than a short one.
Separates are underrated. A good skirt with a beautiful top reads as more considered than a dress off the rack, and you can wear both again separately, which does wonders for the cost per wear.
A jumpsuit is excellent, and this is exactly where the enclosure question bites: a full-length one is fine everywhere, a short one is out in the Members Enclosure.
Which brings me to my favourite race season outfit, and the honest note attached to it.
The four dollar outfit
Four dollars. A strapless black and white all in one from a shop called Tightrope at Southland, badly creased on the rack, and nothing an iron could not fix. I have never had more comments on an outfit.
Black and white makes it a Derby Day outfit rather than a Cup Day one, and I should be straight with you about the other thing: as a short playsuit it would not pass the Members Enclosure. In General Admission it is perfectly fine. That is exactly why the ticket question comes first.
Sandals by day, pumps and metallic hardware by evening, and the same four dollar outfit carries you from the first race to dinner. I wrote it up at the time in racing into a shortsuit, price and all.
One good accessory, not five
The lawn on Cup Day is a lot of visual noise. The way to look composed in it is to do less than everybody else.
That clutch cost four dollars in an op shop, a matter of weeks before Burberry and Ralph Lauren released their four figure raffia versions. I have carried it for years.
Pick one thing to be the accessory: the bag, or the earrings, or the hat. Not all three competing. And make the bag a clutch or something small with a strap, because you will be holding a drink, a race book and a phone, and you need at least one hand.
Where I actually look for it in Melbourne
People assume a race outfit has to come from a boutique on Collins Street. Fourteen years of doing this says otherwise, and here is the order I work in.
The op shops first, and go early. October is when the spring wardrobes get cleared out, so the racks are at their best right when you need them. The clutch further up this post came out of one. So did half the jewellery I have worn to a track.
Then the outlets. DFO South Wharf and the Brighton strip are where last season’s good dresses end up at a third of the price, and last season is invisible on a lawn. Southland is where the four dollar shortsuit came from, in a little shop that no longer exists, which is its own lesson: the bargain is never in the shop you planned to visit.
Chapel Street for the one thing you cannot find anywhere else. If the whole outfit hinges on a specific colour or a particular shape, this is where I send clients, and I send them with a photograph of the rest of the outfit on their phone so they are matching, not guessing.
The markets for the accessory. Hats, earrings and bags at the Melbourne markets sit at a fraction of racewear prices and nobody else on the lawn will have them.
Start in September. Everything above works beautifully in September and is picked clean by the last week of October.
The traps
Nothing new head to toe. Wear at least one thing you have already had a full day in.
Do not buy for the forecast three weeks out. Buy for the range.
Check it sitting down. You will be on plastic chairs and picnic rugs, not standing in a mirror.
Sunscreen before the dress, not after, and remember white and pale fabrics offer less sun protection than you would think.
Avoid the trend everybody bought. Being the fourth woman in the same dress is the one genuine risk of shopping late from the same three chains.
You do not need to spend much
I want to end where the site started, because Cup Day has become an expensive occasion and it does not have to be.
My most photographed race outfit cost four dollars. The clutch was another four. The bargain here is not the point in itself: the point is that Flemington rewards looking considered, not looking expensive, and once something fits properly nobody on that lawn can tell what it cost.
If you shop the sales from September, or work from what you already own and buy one gap, you will look better than the woman who panic bought on the Sunday before. That whole method is in how to shop smarter and stop wasting money on clothes.
The short version
- Check whether your ticket is Members or General Admission before you buy anything.
- No, you do not need a hat.
- Wedge or block heel. The lawn is grass.
- Dress for a ten to twenty-one degree swing, with a layer that belongs to the outfit.
- Cup Day is the colour day. Pick your colour, not the season’s.
- One accessory does the talking.
- Nothing brand new from head to toe.
Spring is my busiest stretch of the year, and this is why. Most of those bookings end with the outfit assembled from things already hanging up, plus one or two honest gaps, which is a personal styling session in Melbourne at $299 for two hours. Filling the gaps is the separate bit: $399 for a Half Day of personal shopping in Melbourne, which I would put against three hopeful weekends at Chadstone any October.
Now go and check what the lawn is going to do to your heels.
And now you’re Looking Good Girls.
“On the third day Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the king’s palace.” Esther 5:1.