THE world’s first Harris Tweed three-piece suit designed specifically for a racehorse has been unveiled by a fashion designer to celebrate the start of the 2016 Cheltenham Festival.
The new design, topped off with a flat cap, was modelled by veteran racer Morestead, supported by champion jockey Sir Tony McCoy.
The horse outfit was specially commissioned by bookmaker William Hill, which tasked former Alexander McQueen apprentice Emma Sandham-King with creating a stylish suit to kick off the festival.
Sandham-King and her team of seamstresses and tailors spent four weeks creating the suit, using more than 18 metres of genuine tweed shipped from the Isle of Harris.
The ensemble was created with 10 times as much fabric as an equivalent human suit.
William Hill enlisted statistics expert Dr Geoff Ellis, who calculated that enough tweed was worn at the Cheltenham Festival to stretch all the way from the historic racecourse to Ireland.
Ellis studied 32 large-scale crowd photos from the festival to examine the amount of tweed on show, finding that on average 200 miles and seven furlongs (321.5 km) of the fabric are worn every year by spectators. This is enough tweed to stretch one-and-a-half times around every horse race track in Britain and Ireland, the bookmaker said.
Sandham-King said: “Creating the world’s first tweed suit for a horse has been one of the biggest challenges that I have faced in my career as a designer.
“We have used 18 metres of genuine Harris Tweed to create the head-turning fashion garment. Some models can be real divas, but veteran racing horse Morestead was calm and a pleasure to work with.
“Tweed is undergoing a massive revival and this year’s Cheltenham Festival will see the most tweed worn since the 1960s.”
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