Gabriela Hearst has designed the official jockey silks for this year’s Goodwood Ladies’ Day race, joining a lineage of fashion designers including Vivienne Westwood and Sarah Burton who have created the racing colors for the annual charity event. The silks, which will be worn by the amateur female jockeys competing in the race on July 30 at Goodwood Racecourse in West Sussex, draw from Hearst’s own archive—specifically, a wool jacquard from her fall 2023 collection that reinterpreted traditional Scottish tartan through a Uruguayan lens.
For fashion, the Goodwood silks represent something beyond a charity collaboration. They demonstrate how a designer’s archive can function as an active resource rather than a static repository—a collection of patterns, textures, and ideas that can be recontextualized across categories and scales. In an industry that increasingly prizes novelty over continuity, Hearst’s decision to mine her own past rather than invent a new visual language for the silks reads as both an aesthetic choice and a philosophical one: that the most valuable ideas are the ones that can be revisited and transformed.
The Goodwood Ladies’ Day race, now in its seventh year, has become a fixture of the British summer social calendar and a platform for designers to engage with a sport that has historically been more associated with men’s tailoring than women’s fashion. Previous participants include Westwood, who created silks for the inaugural race in 2019, and Burton, who designed for the 2022 edition during her tenure at Alexander McQueen. Hearst’s contribution extends the tradition while introducing a distinctly different design vocabulary—one rooted in the tactile, the textural, and the artisanal rather than the theatrical.
Hearst’s approach to the silks was archival rather than speculative. Rather than designing a new pattern from scratch, she selected the wool jacquard from her fall 2023 collection—a weave that combined the structure of traditional tartan with the earth-toned palette of the Uruguayan landscape—and adapted it to the specific requirements of jockey silks, which must be lightweight, aerodynamic, and recognizable at speed. The resulting garment reads as both a piece of functional sportswear and a fragment of a larger design narrative.
