A day at the races

The sun may not have been shining but the style certainly was as the women of Ireland descended on Ballybrit for ladies day at the annual Galway Races Summer Festival. Gone was the fascinator of previous years as the hatinator reigned supreme, a trend particularly noticeable in the Anthony Ryans Judging Marquee where 50 women were shortlisted for the Best Dressed Lady title.
In the end it was Suzanne McGarry from Sligo who took the coveted prize with Sieglinde Mullers, sporting a design by Galway milliner Edel Ramburg, getting the nod for best hat.
Suzanne wore a red vintage dress, accessorised with a Lina Stein designed dome-shaped cream and black hat with pearls and handmade silk roses.
The judges were on the look out for a Best Dressed Lady with an innate sense of style who could put together a winning ensemble, appropriate to both the wearer and the occasion.
“The style is unbelievable. It is the greatest group of best dressed ladies ever assembled in this city,” said Anthony Ryan, managing director of Anthony Ryan’s Galway.
“There are a lot of very nice hats, a lot of vintage clothes and classic Grace Kelly styling but I don’t know how the judges will decide this year,” Mr Ryan told The Clare Champion before the winner was announced.

DIY designer
Stylish Ennis schoolteacher Emer Healy was among the Ladies Day fashion finalists.
“The hat, I made it myself. I sometimes make hats for my friends who are going to weddings. I got the dress in Babylon vintage shop on Bindon Street for €50. It was a bit big so I got Andre (Andre’s Master Tailors, Ennis) to take it in and my mother sewed the cuttings onto the jacket to make it match. I got my shoes in ShoeRack and the bag in Pamela Scotts,” she said.
While the outfit was Ennis-bought, it was finding a purple umbrella that proved the stumbling block. That was until she was walking down the street on Wednesday and spotted her mark.
“I saw a woman walking down the street with a purple umbrella. I stopped her and explained my predicament. She turned out to be a pharmacist in Holly’s (Holly’s Pharmacy, Ennis.) She was really nice and gave me the umbrella and in return I got her a box of Roses,” Emer explained.
A big advocate of shopping local, Emer gets her fashions close to home whenever possible.
“I regularly browse the shops in Ennis and I particularly like Kymari because I feel you are guaranteed to get something a bit unusual. I also really like Willow and Cornucopia,” she said.
Galway woman Avirl Donellan proved that you don’t need a big budget to make a big impression when she teamed a jacket from Penneys last year with a dress from Swamp and her granny’s bag to secure her place in the judging marquee.
“The amazing thing is that you don’t see anyone twice,” she said of fashion on display, “Everyone this year is so individual especially with their accessories. There are lots of classic looks but all with their own individual twist.”
Orla Hahessy from Ennis found herself in the judging marquee wearing a most unusual hat.
“The outfit is styled by Bridget Haren and the hat is inspired by the Galway Races and parts of the hat are made from real hair,” she commented.
Galway woman Maria Murphy caused quite the stir with her original take on upstyling and was one of the favourites to take the best-dressed title.
“Yellow is my favourite colour,” she said. “It has become a joke now amongst my friends but it really is. I love canary yellow.”
“I got my outfit at Swap in the City, a charity event for the Simon Community. You donate clothes and you get tokens for them. Then you can use the tokens to ‘buy’ other clothes there. So that is where I got my jacket and skirt suit and then I just upstyled it. I got the hat in a vintage shop and made some changes to that. I bought the shoes in Dunnes and sewed in some yellow cord to tie them into the outfit. I bought my bag in a shop in Lahinch,” she explains.
Six-year-old Holly Lynott was the youngest face in the judging marquee. She wore a beautiful emerald green jacquard knee-length dress with a cream collar accompanied by a butterfly-inspired headpiece. Holly told The Clare Champion that her dress was designed and made by her mother Colleen, a fashion student at the London Academy of Dress Making and Design.
Colleen opted for a very similar outfit to that worn by Holly. She donned an emerald green jacquard 60s-style shift dress with a low back and a slightly more ornate headpiece than her daughter.
“I just finished my dress for an exam so I said I’d come here and wear it. I made a matching outfit for Holly and here we are. The fashion is brilliant here. I’ve been to Ascot and while that gets the royal family, this really is different. There is great attention to detail and I have gotten lots of ideas for when I go back to college,” Colleen said.

Hats off
Ennis milliner Fiona Mangan, whose hats featured heavily at Ladies Day this year, noted that the big hat is back.
“There are lots of bigger hats,” she said, “block colours and nudes are really standing out this year too”.
Limerick milliner Aisling Maher was also impressed with the colour she saw on display. “Everyone has a very different take on it and the colours are just immense. That is the one thing about Galway, that everybody goes the whole way with it,” she said.
Of course as well as designing numerous hats for the event, Aisling wore one of her own creations as part of the outfit which saw her selected as one of the finalists.
“This is my second year here in Galway and there is a big difference this time. Last year, everyone was going for tamer colours and styles but this year people have got wilder and upped the fashion stakes. There seems to be a lot more people influenced by the Audrey Hepburn era,” she speculated.

Winning ways
Previous winner of the best-dressed prize, Kerry-woman Carol Kennelly spoke to The ’Champion about how the title and the prize changed her life.
“I had made hats for years but never had any professional training. After I won, I took the winnings and went on a millinery course with Lina Stein in Mayo and then started making hats myself. Winning really changed my life, without this the millinery would never have happened for me. Then last year my friend Anne Marie won and that really launched my millinery career,” she asserted.
“There is a lot of colour, even more than last year. There was a lot of ivory and nudes but it is back to a lot of attention-grabbing colour now. I also notice that there are more hats than fascinators this year.”
Carol’s advice to people trying to perfect their own style is to “dress for your body shape and not what happens to be in fashion this month and know what colours suit you”.
Many will remember the stunning Anne Marie O’Leary who won best-dressed last summer. She again found herself among the finalists this year. The past year, she said, has been a whirlwind of positivity.
“I had an unbelievable year. Winning last year was a major confidence builder and that changed everything. I did a photo shoots, I was asked to model, I made loads of new friends and was introduced really to a whole new world of things. It is so important to be positive and I think ladies day is a great opportunity to do that. You dress up, put your best side out and stand there in what you have chosen.
“Winning last year was so special for me. I put up a photo for my mother, who has since died, of me after I won last year and I wrote a note with it thanking her for teaching me to stand tall,” she recalled.
Barefield woman Sinead Purcell found herself once again nominated for best dressed this year, having taken the best hat honour two years ago. Having had a baby since and now pregnant with her second, Sinead wowed the judges in a knee-length black lace dress with gold underlay. Finding the right outfit when you are seven months pregnant is never an easy feat though.
“I tried to hide the bump for as long as I could until 26 or 27 weeks but I found it hard to get good maternity wear. I looked on the internet for ages and couldn’t find any shop doing designer maternity but then I went to Bump boutique in Galway and they do Tiffany Rose which is a label I had been trying to find.
“I then picked up a brooch in Seoidin which I put on the sash and my shoes are from TK Maxx. I got my Philip Treacy hat from Joanne’s Fashion House in Killaloe,” she outlined.

Mistakes
Judge PJ Gibbons noted a big improvement overall in the style at the course compared to last year.
“We have moved away from fake tan this year, thankfully. It is back to classics. It is like a lot of people were inspired by old movies. Every year when something is put on a pedestal as what we the judges like, as was the case last year with cream, there tends to be a lot of that the next year. There is a lot of cream this year but there is a lot of pink and red everywhere and people are wearing it well. A lot of people this year were making their own hats or telling the milliner exactly what they wanted and I think that is a good thing,” he commented.
“The biggest mistake I see is with younger race goers. With them, there seems to be a race out there as to who can have the shortest hemline. It is like they want to go to a club later but if they want to be nominated then they haven’t got a hope because of the hemlines,” he noted.
“Overall it is a bit quieter this year compared to other years but that makes it a little easier for us. Again this year there were a lot of late arrivals which is unfortunate. There are some ladies who don’t come here thinking of being nominated for best dressed, and some of the time they are the ones who arrive later, and you would like to put them forward but you can’t,” Mr Gibbons went on.
Audrey Kinihan of University Pharmacy in Galway and Rochford’s Pharmacies in Clare is one of the backers of best dressed at the festival.
“Overall I would say the style is very different to last year. I would find it impossible to pick a winner. Everyone on the shortlist is very different but there is a lot of block colour.
“In terms of their make-up I would have to say that everyone is very well presented but even if they aren’t we have a make-up station here where they can get any touch ups they need. The worst mistakes we have seen in recent years is where people have worn badly-applied fake tan or where their makeup has just worn off,” she said.

Positivity
“Per capita, I would say this is the most dressed-up group of women I have ever seen in my life,” noted Brendan Courney from RTÉ’s Off the Rails.
“I have noticed a lot of eco or green fashion today which is great. While there used to be Gucci and Chanel, there is now a lot more vintage and a lot of people are wearing what they wore to Killarney and are not ashamed of it. I think we needed that,” he went on.
“Everyone is upstyling. About one third of the people I asked had made their own hat. People are wardrobe recycling and it is all about investment pieces. When you are investing in something you have to wear it and you just divide the cost of the piece by the number of wears and you calculate the cost per wear. If a dress is €200 and you wear it 20 times, that is only €10 per wear,” the well-known presenter continued.
“People are really having a go, bejewelling and bedazzling and I think it is really positive to have a dress-up day in July for people. It is just brilliant for people to have a bit of fun and dress up,” Brendan concluded.