Tomorrow thousands of people, including celebrities and members of the royal family will descend on Ascot Racecourse to wear fancy hats, gamble, and get legless while watching horses being pushed to their limits for their entertainment. The Royal Ascot, like other famous races such as Cheltenham or, in Australia, the Melbourne Cup, are as beloved by the fashion industry as by the sporting and gambling worlds.

But as fashion is increasingly moving away from cruelty to animals by ditching fur and exotic animal skins, and even increasingly searching for vegan alternatives to leather, why does the industry continue its enthusiastic support for this brutal - and too often lethal - ‘sport’?

In the weeks leading up to major races like Ascot, you’ll find promotions of race day fashion in magazines, newspapers, and on the websites of fashion brands. Hello!, Grazia, the Evening Standard, House of Fraser, Pretty Little Thing, and Karen Millen are among the media outlets and brands advertising the best outfits to wear while enjoying a spot of animal exploitation in the sunshine this week. Like most of society, the fashion world remains selective in its support for animal protection, failing to grasp - or willfully ignoring - the evidence that shows horse racing to be detrimental to the horses. Celebrity attendance at races makes it seem like a much more acceptable activity than it should be, and maintains the interest of fashion editors, brands, and customers.

Some might defend the link between fashion and racing by pointing out that, unlike with fur, the horses aren’t being killed for fashion. But in a way they are. Animal Aid’s Race Horse Death Watch counts 2460 deaths since the initiative was launched in 2007. Many of the horses suffer injuries during races and are later put down as they can no longer race, while some have died on track from injuries and heart attacks. Dead horses are not even always treated with dignity, as revealed in 2021 after a horse trainer and a jockey were both discovered to have sat on and jumped on dead horses. Just because race attendees aren’t wearing the animals’ skins doesn’t mean they aren’t complicit in their deaths.

Recent attempts by the Royal Ascot to promote sustainable fashion have served to further obscure the contradictions in the fashion industry’s relationship with racing. Last year, the Royal Ascot style guide encouraged people to wear secondhand outfits and partnered with Bay Garnett, a British fashion stylist known as a pioneer of thrifting who spoke at a COP26 panel in Glasgow last November about decarbonising the fashion industry. While horse racing has no direct bearing on the sustainability of our clothing, it forms part of the larger system of exploitation of and violence towards animals that underpins our unsustainable lifestyles. 

As shown by recent research from the Stockholm Environment Institute, which we reported on here, building a more sustainable world requires taking the welfare and moral value of animal lives seriously. Meanwhile, a growing number of prominent environmentalists point out that the future of humanity depends on a significant transformation of our relationship with other species, Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, being the latest. They are focused on how we treat wildlife and what we eat, but if society were to seriously try to reset how it relates to other species, doing away with particularly superfluous types of exploitation like horse racing would be the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. It’s hard to imagine a world where we have successfully curtailed our exploitation of other species only to continue indulging in wearing fancy clothes while screaming drunkenly at exhausted horses, who may well die from the effort, to run faster.

Living more sustainably and compassionately can’t be achieved as a disconnected series of actions that we carry out only as long as they don’t infringe on people ‘having fun’. For cruelty, along with wastefulness, to be excised from the fabric of the fashion industry, it must look not just at what materials it uses, but also at what other statements it is making about the acceptability of animal exploitation.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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