Lizzie Hughes has lived in the horse racing world all her life. When your mother has ridden with the Queen Mother in her carriage at Royal Ascot, it’s quite natural that daughter Lizzie has found a niche market in hiring out ladies hats for the big race days – and for other occasions too.
Her father Richard Hannon trained at Herridge just east of Collingbourne Ducis – a highly successful yard now taken over by her brother, also called Richard. The yard – which is always located simply as ‘Marlborough’ on race cards – was home to Lizzie as she grew up.
Lizzie is married to flat racing’s Champion Jockey Richard Hughes – a title he has won three years running and wants to win again this year, which will be his last season in the saddle. They have two young children. This is the fifth year she has been hiring out ladies hats.
At her headquarters behind their current home, Lizzie has an Aladdin’s cave of stunning hats and headpieces – 450 of them in every colour and from the restrained to the flamboyant. This year’s trend for neon colours has added some vibrant shades to the mix.
Considering the cost of many of her designer hats, her charges for hiring them out are modest – between £30 and £90. Or you can buy a hat that really takes your fancy and will last you more than a day.
There is one exception to the hire price: the ultra eye-catching number which was given to her so long as she passed procceeds from hire charge to The Injured Jockeys Fund. It is a surreal concoction of Philip Treacy butterflies – see photo below – for hire at £110.
Some of Lizzie’s full range of hats are from the top designers – like Philip Treacy – and about fifty of them have been passed on to her by her mother. These include the classic creation Jo Hannon wore twenty-two years ago when she accompanied the Queen Mother at Royal Ascot.
And it still looks a thousand pounds today – it was, after all, designed by Rachel Trevor-Morgan who is now the Queen’s milliner.
Lizzie only hires out the best – some come via e-Bay, some from clients. She is a great fan of Philip Treacy, but much as he approves of Lizzie’s choice of hats, he will not sell to hire. That may be a good thing as his bespoke designs can cost up to £1,400.
Ladies need hats for the big race days – Derby Day at Epsom, Cheltenham Festival, Glorious Goodwood, Aintree’s Grand National meeting, Royal Ascot and now, coming up on the rails, there is Champions’ Day at Ascot – the climax of the flat season and joining the elite racing calendar.
On the Tuesday of Royal Ascot, Lizzie will hire out about 140 hats, with a hundred hires for each of the subsequent days. At Royal Ascot (June 16-20) and the Investec Derby (June 6), she has an on site service for her clients.
They can pick up their hats at the racecourse and hand them back by 7.00pm at the end of the day – a sort of day return service. For this labour intensive task she has been helped by her sister, Julie, and her niece Georgie Ince.
However, there was such a rush for this year’s Royal Ascot that Lizzie has had to put a stop to online bookings.
Lizzie has her own ideas about the received theories of face shapes and finding hats to fit faces. Online booking may be fine for people she has hired to before but she prefers to meet her clients face to face – so to speak: “Face shapes don’t always get you to the right hat. You’ve got to try them on because then you’ll find a hat that you wouldn’t think will suit – but does.”
Royal Ascot, as everyone knows, is not a ‘come as you are’ party. It has its own strict fashion rules – which depend on the enclosure you are going to be in. And this year they have provided a video guide to their rules – and for those with rural broadband speeds there is a well-illustrated pdf version.
In the Royal Enclosure hats should be worn. But fascinators are banned – and ‘headpieces’ (which are hats trying, to my untutored eye, to look like fascinators) have to have a base four inches wide. Lizzie, who is a bit disdainful about fascinators, rather wishes the base was increased to six inches.
In the Grandstand, however, “A hat, headpiece or fascinator should be worn at all times.” We do not here need to get into the rules about straps, shoulders and midriffs.
Times are changing for the Hughes family. When Richard retires from riding at the end of this season, he will start training and they will be moving from Collingbourne Ducis to Danebury near the old Stockbridge racecourse. The hats will move into a ‘very large’ temporary building at the new training yard.
Richard is now loosening his ties to his brother-in-law, Richard Hannon’s yard where he has been stable jockey for many years – partly so he can choose more rides to get him to the top of the jockeys’ table and partly because he needs to spend time preparing his new yard and attending the racehorse sales. And Lizzie will be spending less time on the hats.
She wants to have more time with the children as they grow up and she knows that she will spend more time helping Richard: “Now, when he’s working, he just goes away for the day. It’ll be different when he’s training – I’ll need to be around much more.”
There will still be call for her hats – whether for race days or for an investiture, a wedding, garden parties or even for the opening of Parliament.
That ancient advertising slogan “If you want to get ahead, get a hat” had nothing to do with Ladies Days at the races. And, sad to say, even the best, most splendid hat will not guarantee the horse you bet on winning for you – not even by a head.
There are many more photos of Lizzie’s hats in the Collections and Gallery sections of her website.
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