From the first Melbourne Cup, Australia’s premier racing event has showcased cutting-edge design as well as transitions from the old to the new. Fashion designers and milliners consider the Spring Racing Carnival a most important annual event, and it is fashion that attracts many thousands of men and women to the course each year.
It is the Melbourne Cup that brings this multitude together. Their clothes have been ordered long ago, at unlimited cost, and without bounds as to beauty and magnificence, and have been kept in concealment until now, for unto this day they are consecrated. I am speaking of the ladies’ clothes; but one might know that.
And so the grand stands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a delirium of colour, a vision of beauty.
Mark Twain, 1897, Following the Equator
View the fashions of the 1896 Melbourne Cup
