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On Fashionable Attire in the Show Ring
I don’t do fashion. I don’t buy fashion, I don’t understand fashion, and most of the time I just don’t see the differences people are talking about. In the hunter ring, for example, rail birds will critique the shade of this rider’s breeches compared to that rider’s breeches. I’m sorry? Aren’t they both some sort of puke green color?
So far as I can tell, hunter fashion involves dressing exactly the same as everyone else, unless you want to be daring and stand out. Then you dress exactly the same as everyone else but a shade or two lighter (or darker). However, don’t do this unless you are certain you will put down a spectacular round, because otherwise you’ll call more attention than you’d like to your faults. Everyone will talk about “that girl with the more-tan-than-green breeches who chipped the lattice gate.” You’ll die of shame and never be able to enter a show ring again.
I don’t see it, really, but then sometimes I will point out a perfectly nice blue shirt someone is wearing and they will look confused for a moment and then say, “My shirt’s green.” So you’ll be entirely unsurprised, I’m sure, to hear that my first showing experience was a disaster, attire-wise. Even I can see that now, looking back at pictures. And if I can see it….
Let’s just say that a friend heard I was showing and assured me she had some old show clothes she thought might fit me. Did “old” ring any alarm bells? It should have. Let’s also say that she kindly offered to braid my horse for me, to save me the cost. And, just for laughs, let’s say she had ridden dressage back in the day and I was going into the hunter ring.
Now, I didn’t know that there was a difference between hunter clothes and dressage clothes, so it never occured to me to mention it to my trainer. I’m sure my trainer wished I had, but the first clue she got that all was not well in Proper Attire Land was when she peeked in on my friend’s braiding job and saw fifteen fat button braids.
And then I presented myself, and to my trainer’s credit, she didn’t faint. Boots several inches too short and too large? Check. White breeches? Oh yes. A white short-sleeved shirt? Yup. A jockey skull-cap helmet with a black satin cover? Definitely. And to complete the picture? A dressage-cut short coat with big gold buttons and a velvet collar.
The only thing right in my turnout, you might say, was the fact that the helmet’s cover was black and not a neon pink leopard print.
I suspect some kind parent hunted down all the more experienced junior riders in the barn and threatened to flay them alive if they made fun of me. I do know someone hunted up some spare tan breeches and a velvet helmet. There was nothing to be done about the coat. Or its velvet collar.
The pony and I won a couple of classes, which just goes to show that neat and tidy in a novice show was still more important than fashion trends. Or else the judge saw the coat and felt nostalgic for her own beginner/novice days, when such coats might have been in fashion.
After the show, my trainer quietly took my parents and I aside and tactfully suggested that we speak with her before purchasing a coat or breeches. The coat hung around in my room until the day my new show coat arrived, at which point I was able to compare the two. I’m not saying I understood, then, why one coat was so bad and the other was so great, but I was able to notice minor details, like the fact that my new show coat didn’t have big gold buttons or a velvet color. I filed these details away for later, and later, when I understood that the only difference, really, was that someone, somewhere decided one type of coat was “bad” while the other was “good,” I shrugged and filed the offending velvet collared coat in a box in the attic. You never know: it could come back into fashion some day. It even has a red lining, and I hear colored linings are the in thing now.
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