Goodwood, July 30... and the entire fashion menagerie is already stirring. Out come the hats, the porcelain laughter, the carefully rehearsed expressions… the Magnolia Cup, they call it… charitable, they say… as though charity had ever needed embroidered silks and VIP grandstands to exist, as though we hadn’t already perfected the ritual with balls, galas, and society auctions where money merely changes pockets between two glasses of lukewarm champagne in exchange for a tax deduction.

Gabriela Hearst, it seems, has been rummaging through her drawers… two Mexican patterns hauled out from the bottom of an old trunk, dusted off like sacred relics and pressed onto fabric… and suddenly it’s called creation, it’s called homage, it’s called reinvented heritage. I call it recycling through a monocle, scraps pretending to be art.

And the others before her… Westwood, Burton, Katrantzou… the whole parade of charitable couturiers, haute couture descending once a year to mingle with the racing crowd, seeking absolution for charging indecent prices the other three hundred and sixty four days… months of training, they tell us, these amateur riders, as though clearing three hurdles on an English racecourse were the feat of the century, as though West Sussex itself might tremble.

West Sussex! The very name sounds like a private joke shared among people who’ve never known cold, never known hunger, never lacked anything except other people’s attention… and for the invited bimbos, a memorandum.

The race, the hurdles… it’s folklore, bourgeois carnival, a village fête for those who have nothing left to prove except that they still exist a little, that they’re still being watched a little, that they’re still being mentioned in the fashion pages. That’s the whole performance. That’s the whole charity. A horse, a hat, a hurdle… and the world goes on, unperturbed, applauding the emptiness galloping past while the bombs keep falling on Kyiv.

FM