Race Style & Social: The Account Documenting Irish Race Fashion

Go to any Irish racecourse on a style day and you will find the same scene. A judging panel works the enclosure from half eleven. Finalists are called to a marquee. Photographers from two or three agencies work the winners' circle for the picture that will run in tomorrow's gallery. And somewhere in the middle of it, moving faster than any of them, is a woman with a microphone in a branded foam windshield, asking a stranger in a hat to walk towards her.

That is Race Style & Social. Since May 2024 it has published 2,363 posts — the figure on its Instagram profile on 23 August 2026 — across at least fifteen Irish racecourses and one English one. No Irish newspaper, magazine or broadcaster has produced anything approaching that volume of race-fashion coverage in the same period. It is, as far as we can establish, the most complete visual record of what Irish people actually wear to the races that currently exists.

What it has not yet got is the recognition to match. Search the Irish press, the racing press and every racecourse in the country and you will not find its name. Both things are true at once — the archive and the silence — and the gap between them is the interesting part, because it is closing.

Watch this video on TikTok — @racestyleandsocial

The signature walk-up, in front of the sponsor's flower wall at Galway: a black strapless column under a sheer web-lace overskirt, finished with a spiked black headpiece. Day five of the festival, for Athlone Towncentre's Friday's Most Stylish. From Race Style & Social's TikTok.

What it actually is

The bio is unpretentious and tells you most of what you need: "Hub for all the Fashion and Fun, Style and Social of the Races and Ladies Days". The tagline, which appears on every branded graphic the account makes, is "Set your heart racing…".

It runs on three channels. Instagram, @racestyleandsocial, carries 17.5k followers and is where the work is made. Facebook, under the slightly punchier name Race Style and Social, carries 29K — a reminder that Facebook is still where Irish racing's core audience lives, and that the numbers there run roughly five to ten times the Instagram equivalents. A Punchestown finalists post on Facebook drew 1.9K reactions and 96 comments; the best-performing Instagram post we found managed 429 likes. There is also a TikTok, @racestyleandsocial, carrying 8,912 followers and 94.1K likes — the smallest of the three channels, running the same vertical-video work, and the only one whose posts still embed cleanly outside the platform.

Both main accounts carry Meta Verified badges, added in August 2025. Instagram's own transparency panel gives the join date as May 2024 and the account's base as Ireland; Facebook's gives a page creation date of 22 May 2024. So the whole thing is roughly twenty-seven months old.

The format, which is the whole trick

Around nine in every ten grid posts is a vertical video. The structure barely varies: a presenter stops a racegoer, the racegoer walks toward the camera, and the outfit gets talked through — where the dress came from, who made the hat, what the shoes cost. Then a title card, drawn from a fixed set that has become the account's grammar:

• Winner's Reaction · Winner's Comments · Winner alright! Winner alright!
• Top 5 Finalists · Top 10 Finalists · Top 5 Men · All the Finalists
• Judges Comments · What are the judges looking for?
• A word from our sponsor

Watch this video on TikTok — @racestyleandsocial

"What is the judge looking for" — Marietta Doran, judge and MC at Sligo Races Ladies Day, sets out her criteria trackside. From Race Style & Social's TikTok.

Two people hold that microphone. @niamhlordan presents on most race days — "@niamhlordan will be there to record it all", as one caption has it — and @michaelfitz111 has also worked the mic, at the Curragh and at Kilbeggan. Behind them, Orlaith runs the operation. It is a very small team covering a very long season.

It is repeatable, it is cheap, and it scales — which is exactly why the account can post forty to sixty items in a single race day while a newspaper runs one gallery. The trade-off is that engagement per post is modest. Volume is the strategy, not virality.

What the video does that a photograph cannot is capture the two things the gallery format has always thrown away — the wearer's own account of the outfit, and the moment of winning. There is a post from Tramore on 16 August, the account's strongest of the month at 429 likes, that is nothing more than a woman in blush pink putting her hands to her face under stage lighting. No newspaper picture desk would file it. It is the best thing on the feed.

Watch this video on TikTok — @racestyleandsocial

"Winner !" — Leah Kelly takes Ladies Day at Sligo Races, announced in front of the lined-up finalists on the grass. From Race Style & Social's TikTok.

Between the video there is a second, quieter register: still graphics on a consistent house template — cream or sage-green card, serif lockup, the italic strapline — used for meeting announcements, season calendars and the occasional fashion quote. It is a more disciplined visual identity than most Irish media brands three times its age manage.

The map

We verified the following racecourses directly from Instagram captions and location tags: Killarney, Tramore, Sligo, the Curragh, Listowel, Leopardstown and Downpatrick. Searching the Facebook archive, which mirrors Instagram and goes back further, adds Punchestown, Galway, Fairyhouse, Down Royal, Naas, Bellewstown, Navan, Ballinrobe, Gowran Park, Roscommon, Wexford, Limerick and Dundalk, plus Cheltenham across the water.

That is a wider beat than any single Irish outlet runs. The national papers cover Galway, the Derby and Punchestown; the regional press covers whatever is nearest. Gowran Park and Ballinrobe do not get style galleries in the Irish Times. They get them here.

Watch this video on TikTok — @racestyleandsocial

Getting all the details from Judge Yvonne at Roscommon Racecourse's Style Stakes, in front of the course's flower wall. From Race Style & Social's TikTok.

What the circuit is worth

The context matters, because race fashion in Ireland is not a niche. Horse Racing Ireland's figures for 2025 put total attendance at Irish meetings at 1.316 million, up 6% across 390 fixtures, with prize money of €70.76m. HRI's 2023 socioeconomic study valued the industry's direct and stimulated expenditure at €2.46bn, supporting 30,350 jobs.

Galway alone drew 124,745 across the 2026 festival. Ladies' Day on the Thursday took 24,128 of them — though, in a detail that complicates the received wisdom, the Friday beat it with 27,783. Galway's chief executive Michael Moloney attributed the Thursday shift partly to a new policy requiring under-18s to be accompanied, and was candid about it: "Thursday has had issues in the past with an over bias toward young people attending and we didn't have that this year."

The prize money on the style circuit is real money. Galway's Best Dressed is €10,000 with a further €3,000 for Best Hat — the largest cash prize in Irish race fashion, and flat at €13,000 since at least 2023, though the sponsor has moved from Connacht Hospitality Group to the Irish skincare brand Ella & Jo, now in year two of a three-year deal. Punchestown's Bollinger Best Dressed pays in kind but arguably pays more: a trip to the Bollinger estate in Reims, private cellar tours, and a year's supply of champagne. Listowel's McElligotts and Kia competition, in its twelfth consecutive year of that sponsorship, sends its winner to Sorrento for a week and adds €1,000 for Most Creative Headpiece and €500 for Most Contemporary Outfit.

Who was already doing this

The incumbent model is the picture gallery, and it is not in retreat. The Irish Times ran both a reported feature and a separate "in pictures" package from Galway Ladies' Day. The Connacht Tribune ran the day as a live blog, published at 10:48 and updated until 16:37, alongside two standalone galleries.

Behind those galleries sits a well-established supply chain. The credit line on the Irish Times' 2025 Galway gallery names three sources in one breath: Morgan Treacy/Inpho, Andrew Downes/Xposure and Brian McEvoy. Sportsfile's Seb Daly shot the Connacht Tribune's 2026 coverage. And Healy Racing, based in Listowel, has been photographing Irish racing since 1975 — half a century of it.

There is also a direct analogue worth naming, because it got there first on a different platform: Horse&Field, a Substack covering the Irish and Northern Irish style circuit in detail, particularly Down Royal and Downpatrick. Race Style & Social is not the only independent doing this. It is the only one doing it in vertical video, at this volume.

The one doing the same thing, from across the water

There is a direct comparison worth making, and it is flattering rather than otherwise. Raceday TV works the same format — a presenter, a crowd, a coloured foam windshield, a vertical video — and it has taken that format to an enormous audience. Its numbers are on a different scale entirely: Racecourse Media Group, which runs it, reported passing one billion video views across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok in January 2026, and 100 million in Cheltenham week alone in March 2026.

The face of it is Frankie Foster, who came to racing via Love Island in 2018 and now fronts the channel with what RMG calls its "now-iconic orange microphone". He is a genuine fashion figure in his own right, not just a presenter pointed at clothes — he founded Franc James, a tie brand he describes as "inspired by racehorse trainers' sartorial choices", and fronts House of Fraser's men's race-day guide. On his own approach: "My style is built around pieces that make you feel manly, and by that I mean pieces that have stood the test of time."

Frankie Foster talks to Nick Luck on Racing TV's Luck On Sunday about Raceday TV's Cheltenham coverage and why social matters to racing.

Two things about Raceday TV are worth holding onto, because they cut in opposite directions.

The first is that it is not the plucky outsider its output suggests. RMG is owned by 37 racecourse shareholders across Britain and Ireland, and Racing TV holds the media rights to 26 Irish racecourses. The behind-the-scenes access flows from that rights position, not from turning up and asking nicely. Its origin story — Clive Cottrell, RMG's marketing director, calls it "an experiment with a mobile phone and an orange microphone" — is true, but the experiment happened inside the sport's own media company.

The second is that Raceday TV is British, and its Irish presence is a visiting one. Foster travels in for Listowel and Killarney; 2026 is only his second Listowel. His verdict on it, before this year's trip: "I'm buzzing to be heading to Listowel with the Raceday team and the famous orange mic in hand."

Which leaves an obvious space. Raceday TV comes to Ireland twice a season and does it beautifully. Race Style & Social is at Ballinrobe and Gowran Park and Tramore and Sligo, week in and week out, all year, and has been for two seasons. Those are not competing propositions. They are different jobs, and only one of them is currently being done by someone who lives here.

The judging panels are already social

Here is the part of the picture that makes the account's position less improbable than it first looks. Irish racecourses have been recruiting social-media fashion creators onto official judging panels for at least three years, and the trend is documented and accelerating.

Galway booked Rachel Gorry in 2023 billed explicitly as a "Social Media Influencer". Its 2025 panel included Lisa McGowan of Lisa's Lust List — herself a former best-dressed winner. Its 2026 panel included the broadcaster Laura Fox. Fairyhouse has used Naomi Clarke, "The Style Fairy". And Listowel's 2026 panel is the clearest signal of all: both judges are social-media fashion figures — Aoife Dunican, who works as The Style Bob, and Frankie Foster, described by the racecourse as a "Raceday TV presenter and content creator".

The racecourses have gone further than hiring creators. Downpatrick, announcing its August Style Month, stated that the prizes "will be announced shortly via the Downpatrick Racecourses social media channels" — not by press release, not through a media partner. The institution itself now treats social as the primary publication channel.

So the seat Race Style & Social would need already exists, and racecourses have shown for three years that they will fill it with exactly this kind of account. It just has not yet been offered to this one.

Watch this video on TikTok — @racestyleandsocial

"Winner Alright! Winner Alright!" — the Ella & Jo Ladies Day winner at Galway in a checked ruffle-shouldered gown, wide-brimmed hat and orange heels, talking into the branded mic. From Race Style & Social's TikTok.

What we could not verify

Any external footprint at all. This is the most striking finding and the one we most expected to disprove. We searched the Irish Independent, Irish Times, RTÉ, Irish Examiner, Irish Country Magazine, Image.ie, Goss.ie, VIP, EVOKE, the Irish Mirror, a dozen regional titles, the Racing Post, HRI and every racecourse site on the circuit. We found zero third-party mentions. No competition names it as a judge, media partner or content partner. Whatever it is building, the surrounding industry has not yet acknowledged it in public.

How far the TikTok archive goes back. The account is @racestyleandsocial, with 8,912 followers and 94.1K likes. Its visible grid covers Galway, Sligo and Roscommon through July and August 2026; how much sits behind that we could not establish by scrolling.

Exact follower counts. Meta rounds. 17.5k and 29K are what the platforms display, not precise figures.

The earliest post. At forty to sixty posts per race day, 2,363 items is not reachable by scrolling. The May 2024 start date comes from the platforms' own transparency panels rather than from the archive itself.

The verdict

Race Style & Social has worked out something the Irish fashion press has been slow to: that the interesting thing about race day is not the winning outfit photographed against a hoarding, but the woman describing where she got it, and the fifteen finalists who did not win, and the man in the burgundy three-piece who drove up from Cork. Galleries flatten all of that. Video does not — and nobody in Ireland is capturing it at this range.

Watch this video on TikTok — @racestyleandsocial

The men get equal billing: the Best Dressed Gentleman at Roscommon's Style Stakes, in a pale three-piece and a straw boater, applauded in by the other finalists. From Race Style & Social's TikTok.

Talent and work rate are not the question — 2,363 posts in twenty-seven months settles that. What is missing is recognition: a seat on the panels, and the credit that comes with having covered the circuit more completely than anyone else in the country.

And the seat is there. Listowel has handed its entire 2026 judging panel to two social-media fashion figures, one of whom presents for a rival channel that visits Ireland twice a year. On the evidence of the last two seasons, an Irish account that has covered fifteen racecourses without missing a season has earned the same call.

All figures observed on 23 August 2026. Clips are shown via TikTok's and YouTube's official embeds and remain the property of Race Style & Social, Racing TV and their collaborating photographers.