No skirting the gender issue as racing fashion winner makes history

History was made at the 60-year-old Myer Fashions on the Field at Flemington on Thursday when one of the national winners was a man wearing a skirt – his own creation.

Sherlon Garbo, 31, was a popular winner of the inaugural best suited category, which replaced the anachronistic “best male” and “best female” categories that were a mainstay of the racewear fashion competition for decades.

Garbo, a nurse from the Northern Territory, said it was thrilling to win the first year of the revamped competition. “Everyone can wear a suit, everyone can wear a skirt,” he said, adding he was inspired by Harry Styles, who frequently plays with gender ambiguity in his red-carpet looks, and Brad Pitt, who wore a skirt to the premiere of his film Bullet Train this year.

A winner of the digital COVID-era Fashions on Your Front Lawn competition in 2020, Garbo is no stranger to dressing up in the name of racing. But he said this year was harder knowing he was going to be up against women and non-binary entrants in the best suited category.

One of the judges and Victoria Racing Club ambassador Christian Wilkins declared the competition a huge success: “This feels like the future of racing fashion,” he said, after a week in which racing norms were regularly ditched and fashion stunts outshone true style at various times in the Birdcage.

Wearing a much more traditional outfit, though still a departure from the full-skirted looks that dominated the fashions competitions of old, best dressed winner Bernadette May confessed a “reject outfit” took her all the way from the Cup Day heats to the national final, in which she took home a new car, among other prizes.

“I was going to enter this outfit online but I showed my friends and none of them jumped up and down about it,” she said. “So I thought, I’ll wear it to Flemington but in the back of my head I didn’t think I had a chance.”