It's the biggest day in any Liverpuddlian's beauty calendar, but what really goes on in preparation for a day out at Aintree? Anna Hart goes behind the scenes at Ladies Day to find out...
It is 7am on day two of the Grand National, and the staff of Liverpool’s Harvey Nichols Beauty Bazaar have been up since 5.30am. Ladies Day is the biggest day of the year and there’s a palpable buzz in the air, heightened by the steady pop of prosecco corks at the in-house bar. Senior hair stylist David Halsall has ten hour-long appointments back-to-back and the Electric Hair concession, along with the MAC and Bobbi Brown counters downstairs, were fully booked back in February. Women in tracksuits stream through the only open doors on the street and up to their favourite make-up artist, brandishing race-day dresses, clutches, shoes and fascinators so they can find precisely the right shade of coral. They whip out iPhones and point at Pinterest boards of the look they’re after.
“Yep, Liverpool girls definitely know what they want,” grins David. Most come for the works, spilling £240 on a blowdry, MAC or Bobbi Brown makeover, mani/pedi, browshape and lash extensions. But 19-year-old Sophia Hatoum is no Aintree rookie, and she’s got her routine perfected. “Shellac was a gamechanger; now I get my nails done during the week, along with my tan, so I get another hour in bed on Ladies Day,” she says, fully made-up in MAC, as David carefully pin-curls her hair into an elaborate up-do.
No self-respecting Liverpudlian does Aintree by halves; the average fashion/beauty spend is £700, and today is the culmination of months of planning. 80% of female racegoers buy their dresses six weeks in advance, 42% spending over £500 on a dress destined to be a “one-wear-wonder”. With a rustle of crepe paper, 21-year-old Jade Barton shows me her slinky number, and tells me that in Liverpool, Instagram has killed off the concept of an investment dress. “Once you’re photographed in a dress, you can never ever wear it again,” she says with a shrug. Like Sophia, Jade has been up since 5.30am, even though the first race isn’t until 2pm. “Arrive any later than 11am and the Best Dressed Contest queue is outta control,” chimes in another customer, before being drowned out by the blast of a blowdryer.
If the UK has a glamour capital, that tiara belongs to Liverpool. Merseyside women spend four times the national average on beauty and grooming, and take the longest to get ready: 46% spend more than three hours prepping for a night out. “Why wouldn’t you?” says Jade. “It’s often the best bit of the night.” Bolstering these cold hard statistics is the simple truth that when you step off the train at Liverpool Lime Street from any other UK city, you immediately feel scruffy and underdone. “I’d call it attention to detail,” says Sophia, and I agree. Every woman I see is immaculate, with Shellaced nails, extended lashes, blowdried hair, bronzed limbs and lined lips.
But as we enter the grounds, I realise it’s a far from uniform look. Some girls go for slinky long dresses with vampish, gothlike berry-lips and smoky eyes, others embrace candy-hued pastels and babydoll frocks, and all the vintage eras are robustly represented here, from gilded 1920s Gatsby-esque glamour to 1950s rockabilly brights and matte red lips. The only thing I don’t see is a low-maintenance look. “Why would you want to look natural, when you could look fabulous?” asks Sophia, pouting with perfectly MAC Ruby Wooed lips.
I can’t think of a better riposte to Aintree’s critics - and critics aren’t in short supply. The trivialisation and mockery of fashion and beauty is a popular sport; and the Grand National is a major event in the sporting calendar. Every year, tabloid photographers scour the grounds for tired, tipsy women bending over to apply a plaster to a stiletto-savaged foot. They go desperately seeking smeared lipstick, rain-stained mascara, mottled fake tan and VPL, because if the races are the main story, the fashion and beauty disasters of ordinary British women offers a salacious subplot. It’s misogyny (look at all the silly women!), it’s regional prejudice (look at all the silly Northern women!), it’s snobbery (look at all the silly Northern women in their cheap dresses) and it’s often ageism (ooh, mutton-dressed-as-lamb). It’s a doggedly mean-spirited take on a cherished Great British tradition. “We definitely feel targeted by the tabloids, who are out to portray us as trashy and tasteless,” says Jade. “But they’re missing the point - Aintree isn’t about good taste.” It’s about knowing that you look great, and showing off.
And outlandish looks are all part of the grand tradition of Aintree. Since racegoing became a popular pastime in the 1840s and 1850s, Ladies Day has been a significant date in the social calendar for women in the North-West, the opening of the spring/summer season, and an opportunity to show off the latest fashions you’ve had imported from Paris - or imitated on your own sewing machine. It’s a tradition that endured, through Liverpool’s wealthy decades as a vibrant city port, through the Great Depression of the early 1930s and the devastating decline of the shipping and manufacturing industries in the 1970s and 1980s, to exist in the present day Liverpool, a music-obsessed university city with serious cultural clout. Ladies Day has always been about ostentation, about colour, about extravagant hats, about performance. “The press don’t understand that it’s not a job interview, it’s not a wedding, it’s not front row at Fashion Week - it’s Aintree,” says Lisa Montgomery. “Ladies Day is about being noticed - nobody wants to look like Kate Middleton today.”
So who do they want to look like? “I know it’s unfashionable in the London media, but there’s a lot of love for the WAGs,” says make up artist Melissa at the buzzing Bobbi Brown counter in Harvey Nichols beauty pop-up tent. Lizzie O’Hare and Ellie Stevenson agree. Abbey Crouch, Coleen Rooney, Alex Curran and Danielle Lloyd are local girls, from schools they know, who’ve done good and now live like royalty. “It’s a very Northern mindset that you’ve got to make the most of what you’ve got, and we respect women who have done this,” says Lizzie.
Refreshingly, there’s not even a hint that the race day beauty rituals have anything to do with attracting men. “No, it’s about having fun with your friends, and looking good is about self-respect and pride, high standards that have been passed on from mother to daughter for generations,” says Lizzie. “You’d never see your mum or your gran leaving the house without make-up.”
David tells me that in his youth it was common to see female workers going back to work after lunch on Friday with their hair in curlers. “Today it’s all pin-curls, thankfully - the rollers are gone,” he says. “But next time you’re in Liverpool on a Friday or Saturday afternoon, take a look around - half the girls you’ll see will have their hair pin-curled, in preparation for the night.”
It’s this tough-as-nails, “beauty as armour” approach that makes the ladies of Ladies Day seemingly weatherproof. The looks are many and varied, but I see few coats. Or sunglasses. “We don’t want to hide our eye make-up,” says Ellie laughing. “Same for coats - you mustn’t cover up the best bit.” And I guess the £40 ten-glass pitchers of prosecco go some way to keeping a girl warm, without cramping your style. Ladies of Ladies Day, we salute you...
