Red and jewel tones reign supreme in dazzling Cup fashion
Guests at Flemington left no stone unturned in displays of bold glamour and individual fashion expression for the 2024 Melbourne Cup.
A pristine day at Flemington Racecourse meant guests’ dazzling outfits shone in the sun.
And while the race calls for more expressive fashion from its guests – rather than the black-and-white Derby Day or the relaxed Stakes Day – racegoers found new ways to level up with fashion and show their sartorial oeuvre for the Cup.
The biggest takeaway was colour, but one had the most impact.
“The colour of the day was red, preferably top to toe,” said Vogue Australia executive editor Jessica Montague of the dominance of the bold hue among guests’ outfits.
Take Kate Waterhouse, who wore a dress by Versace and a loose-flowing headscarf in matching red as a fascinator alternative; white cat-eye sunglasses finished off the la dolce vita effect.
Or Olympians Jessica Fox and Ariarne Titmus, who both picked mini-dresses in lipstick red.
“Red was literally everywhere – the bolder the look, the better,” Montague said.
Also popular were jewel-tone hues (those typically associated with fine stones that appear in jewellery, like blues, reds, greens, and burgundy).
To that effect, many of this year’s best-dressed guests wore dresses in block colours that went without patterns or prints; take American socialite Nicky Hilton Rothschild, whose custom Rebecca Vallance dress in butter yellow encapsulated the one-colour trend, with a suite of yellow jewellery to boot. Or influencer Rozalia Russian, who wore a columnar lilac dress by Australian designer Toni Maticevski, with tulle draped from the plunging bodice for dramatic effect.
One can’t help but recall the block-colour white mini-length shift dress worn by Jean Shrimpton when she famously attended Derby Day in 1965 as an example of the power of a single-hue dress for standing out at the races, and an understanding that sometimes the simpler a dress, the more impact it can have.
One of the day’s most memorable fashion moments was worn by 18-year-old aspiring model Lekaiya Rabbitt, who hails from Maningrida in the Northern Territory, 500km east of Darwin.
For the event, she wore a silk dress by Territory-based Ikuntji Artists with a woven bag from the Torres Strait Islands.
She completed her outfit with a showstopper millinery piece by Belinda Osborne of Peacock Millinery, designed to evoke reflections on the water at Katherine Gorge. It made her easily one of the best-dressed on ground for a pumping gala where individual style came to the fore in a bigger way than ever.