Katie Young: 2026 Ashford Castle Style Icon at The Curragh

The Tattersalls Irish Guineas weekend is the racing world's cue that summer has arrived. Across two days in late May it opens the 2026 Irish Classics, fills the Kildare turf with the fastest horses in Europe, and turns the lawns into the season's first proper fashion stage. This year, the look that defined it said almost nothing — and was heard above everything else.

Kildare equestrian Katie Young was named the 2026 Ashford Castle Style Icon, the inaugural style award of the Irish season and, this year, one judged by stylist and broadcaster Marietta Doran alongside Lisa Toomey, Hotel Director of Quality at Ashford Castle.

Katie is elegance personified. Effortless sophistication defined our winner.

— Marietta Doran and Lisa Toomey, judges

Effortless is the word worth lingering on, because nothing about race-day dressing of this calibre is accidental. Katie's ensemble was an essay in restraint: a Self-Portrait midi — a sleeveless, belted white bodice falling into a polka-dot maxi skirt — rented, tellingly, from LaBelle, the new Galway occasion-wear boutique. Over it sat a statement black wide-brim hat from Hats Amour, styled with a length of netting lifted from a hair band to create a soft, veiled finish. A black Kate Spade top-handle bag and monochrome accessories throughout completed a look that never once raised its voice.

Katie's Winning Look — At a Glance

• Dress: Self-Portrait midi — sleeveless belted white top and polka-dot maxi skirt.
• Rented from: LaBelle, Galway — the new Irish occasion-wear rental boutique.
• Hat: statement black wide-brim, Hats Amour, styled with netting from a hair band for a veiled effect.
• Bag: black Kate Spade top-handle.
• Accessories: monochrome throughout.

The Case for Borrowed Brilliance

That it was largely rented is not a footnote — it is the story. The most quietly persuasive race-day dressing of 2026 is increasingly built on borrowed and considered pieces rather than bought-once spectacle, and Katie's win reads as a small endorsement of exactly that shift: invest in the silhouette, rent the statement, and let the styling do the talking.

For her composure, Katie carries off the weekend's most coveted prize — a two-night stay for two at Ashford Castle, the five-star Mayo estate whose name the award carries. Fitting, perhaps, that a look this assured should be rewarded with somewhere equally unhurried.

The Women Who Made the Call

The verdict carried weight because of who delivered it. Marietta Doran has been one of Ireland's most recognisable fashion voices for over two decades — among the first stylists in the country to offer personal shopping, back in 2002, a long-running contributor to RTÉ's Off the Rails, and the resident fashion presenter on RTÉ Racing. Trackside style is, in many ways, her native territory; few people in Ireland have assessed more best-dressed line-ups.

Alongside her sat Lisa Toomey, Hotel Director of Quality at Ashford Castle — the five-star estate whose name the award carries, and whose standards of understated luxury set the tone for what the judges were looking for. Between Doran's eye for proportion and Toomey's instinct for quiet refinement, the brief was clear: polish over peacocking.

A Stage With Centuries Behind It

It helps to remember where all this unfolds. The Curragh is not simply a racecourse but a vast Kildare plain whose name comes from the Irish cuirreach — the place of the running horse. Horses have run here longer than the records can prove: chariots in the third century by some accounts, the warriors of Fionn Mac Cumhaill in the folklore. The first races under rules were held in 1741, and in 1868 an Act of Parliament formally enshrined the plain for racing and training.

Today it is the home of Irish flat racing, staging all five Irish Classics — including the Irish Derby, first run in 1866 — and ten of the country's twelve Group One races. After a redevelopment of roughly €80 million, the modern grandstand reopened in 2019. The Tattersalls Irish Guineas weekend, which hosts the Style Icon Award, opens that Classic season each May with the Irish 2,000 and 1,000 Guineas.

The award itself is young by comparison. Introduced in 2024 — when Cleo Knight took the inaugural title in a vintage, largely charity-shop ensemble — it has quickly become the opening style competition of the Irish season. Its prize is a stay at Ashford Castle, the 13th-century Lough Corrib estate once owned by the Guinness family and now Ireland's only Forbes Five-Star hotel: heritage, restraint and quiet luxury over flash, which is a neat encapsulation of the award's whole sensibility.

If The Curragh's first crown of the year is a signal of where Irish race-day style is heading, the message is clear enough: in a field built for spectacle, the most powerful thing you can wear is calm.