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A LOOK BACK AT THE FIRST KENTUCKY DERBY

HORSEWATCHING FASHION HISTORY AT ITS BEGINNINGS

Jamie Squire

You may know that the Kentucky Derby traces its beginnings to Meriwether Lewis Clark, Jr., grandson of legendary explorer William Clark, who organized a jockey club in Louisville after observing horse races in England and France. But do you know the origin of Derby's unique approach to fashion? Neither did we, so we just made it up!

DALRYMPLE:

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Bushclapp, summon a peasant milliner and inform him we require two of his finest hats forthwith or we will kidnap his children and sell them to Can-A-Da!

BUSHCLAPP:

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I've pickled kids before. I'll do it again. Hey, why we wearin' hats, Dalrymple?

DALRYMPLE: A most amusing society event has been announced, and, as Kentucky gentlemen of style and crippling self-doubt, we must be in attendance.

BUSHCLAPP: I got my special bear-baitin' hat, or as we call it in Hazzard County, A SOM-BEAR-OH.

DALRYMPLE: Bushclapp, this is a formal event! Though, yes, there will be animals. Bless Governor Man-Panther for signing the Bestiary Holiday Act into law.

BUSHCLAPP: Will the ladies be requirin' a head-topping, too?

DALYRYMPLE: The largest, as to space them out prevent clotting of socializing ladies in heated conditions, which leads to spontaneous female combustion as killed several hundred in the Great Frankfurt Lady Clump-fragation of 1839.

BUSHCLAPP: Will we wear sensible clothin' for the pustular heat?

DALRYMPLE: Goodness, no. Only your itchiest and frumpiest, old chum! For this is truly an elegant event: watching horses run in a circle thanks to the threat of punishment corporeal!

BUSHCLAPP: Perchance would that be only the darkest of clothing, as in my coal-black funeral suit worn for the deaths of my five wives?

DALRYMPLE: Oh heavens no. Wear bright colors as to be easily found drowning in the mud of the infield. Remember: at the Derby of Kentucky, you are your own distress beacon!

BUSHCLAPP: Will there be tipplin' waters available?

DALRYMPLE: Do you mean intoxicating beverages or places to relieve the bladder? Yes to the first, no to the second. How grand it shall be!

BUSHCLAPP: Will there be intermissions for scamp-rousting?

DALRYMPLE: Or for duping the lower classes with fraudulent religious institutions of our own devising. Possibility is our amuse-bouche, Bushclapp!

BUSHCLAPP: I don't speak the spaniard's lie, but that sounds fine to me!

DALRYMPLE: Ho! To the track, then, where we shall embrace the one truth: that equine shall never be replaced by machine!

BUSHCLAPP: Nope. Ain't never gonna be a minute in the history ah Dixie where a man'll take his shirt off, drink a mess of mental correctives, and cheer a machine turnin' left.

DALRYMPLE: The horse! It's the servant you can eat!

(They Kid 'n Play kick step off into the sunset.)