Bling is my favorite color

Style reporting live from the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show

There is a feeling that arrives when you descend the escalator into the official grounds of The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, a feeling one associates less with sporting events than with 24-hour diners, certain theme parks, and airport terminals in secondary cities at 4 AM. It’s the sensation of having crossed, without ceremony or signage, into a world that runs on its own self-regulated system, sealed against the bedlam beyond its doors, operating according to a comprehensive and entirely unspoken understanding of what belongs here and what doesn’t. Here, grown women with Bumpit hair in $5,000 rhinestoned suits will look you dead in the eye and tell you this is perfectly normal. And they are right.

The first thing you see is the carpet. Neon purple, effulgent, vacuumed to a uniform pile with not a hair on it, which is worth noting, given the paw traffic. The dogs arrive in relay teams: owner, exhibitor, groomer, with a trail of luggage, the way a celebrity arrives at the Met Gala, swept in from a black car and surrounded by people who know exactly where to stand and what to carry and when to disappear. They have been brushed, set in curlers, clipped, hit with the straightening iron, and blown out. One is carried like a wedding cake. Another is wearing a bow the size of a fist. These dogs do not drool. They move across the purple pile in a slow, syncopated canter, glossy coats flowing in the wake of an animal’s stride, radiating such a concentrated unreality that when one of them squats and produces, right there on the carpet, the whole stage briefly caves in. Everyone ignores it.

On-site photography by Mila Rae Mancuso

Nearby, a woman in a rhinestoned jacket is having her picture taken in front of a wall clearly designed for this moment; she’s getting all the angles, all the walls, and then “okay now a silly one,” tongue out. The announcer’s voice fills the arena at a volume calibrated for a much larger emergency. You want to pet one of the dogs. You do not know if you are allowed to. Before you can resolve this, a handler slams a burrito into her face; sour cream dribbles down her cheek; the dog laps it off; and she thanks the dog with head pats. You file this away, not sure under what category.

The woman thanking the dog has a name. So does the dog, and she will offer it freely, along with the dog’s lineage, dietary restrictions, and the precise number of people it took to hand-set every rhinestone in her jacket. Westminster has been attracting this type since 1877, when a group of hunters convened at the eponymous hotel to compare their hounds. This congregation became the second-longest-running sporting event in the United States, trailing only the Kentucky Derby.

The first show featured around 1,200 dogs; a standout English Setter was on sale for $5,000, at a time when the average New Yorker earned about $1.30 a day.¹ The dog would cost eleven years of wages, saved to the penny. The prizes included a case of stuffed North American game birds, ivory opera glasses, and a thirty-two-calibre revolver.² A hundred and fifty years later, the glass cases housing guns have turned to precious metal retailers selling dog pendants at a thousand dollars (chain sold separately); and the dogs have traded their hunting credentials for the lifestyles of a stay-at-home girlfriend, and the hunters have become women in rhinestoned knit suits with hot dogs tucked into their cheeks.

Suits by Gabrielle Chanel, Autumn / Winter 1961 – 62, photographed by Paul Schutzer for Life Magazine. © Paul Schutzer. Via The Victoria and Albert Museum

These handlers, almost uniformly, wear variations on a single sartorial theme: the knit skirt-suit. The silhouette recalls designs from the 1950s and 60s by Gabrielle Chanel, the disciplined femininity of the bouclé or tweed jacket and a matching knee-length pencil skirt, but pastiched with the ferocious, sparkle-hungry demands of figures like Abby Lee Miller, landing somewhere between drag performance wear and Pentecostal Sunday’s Best. There is an aesthetic language here that operates on the principle of more: more extravagance, more hairspray, more sparkle, more doubling down on whatever this is.

Martha was adjusting her Shih Tzu’s topknot when we approached her, tending to her dog with the surgical precision of a mother preparing her kin for cotillion. As a breeder who travelled all the way from South Carolina, she made sure to dress for the occasion. Her suit was so densely rhinestoned it functioned as an ambulatory disco ball, each stone so scrupulously hand-set that “most dry cleaners won’t even take it.” Martha’s fashion philosophy was refreshingly straightforward: “Bling is my favorite color.”

She eagerly unveiled her equally embellished “backup suit,” lovingly stowed in a Purina Pro Plan Pet Food & Nutrition synthetic garment bag (pictured above). The look of the 1980s-era St. John typeface became immediately recognizable as the same tag that haunts the knitwear aisles of big-chain thrift stores, alongside Liz Claiborne and Dana Buchman.

Martha warned us, “Every lady who’s serious wears St. John,” and we can verify that everyone we spoke to, except for two breeders, was wearing it. While some women sang the praises of second-hand St. John on eBay, Poshmark, and ThredUp, many buy them retail, where each ensemble can cost upwards of $5,000. Perched in the back corner of the convention center, alongside the booth selling second-hand dog-themed necklaces, was St. John, offering skirt suits in a variety of colors, ranging from butter yellow synthetic boucles to earth-toned knits coated in sequins. “Not every woman,” one groomer from Long Island told us, “is a St. John woman.”

The St. John website touts the brand as “female founded” in 1962 in Southern California by owner Marie Gray.³ Gray appears to have been part of a wave of mid-century American sportswear designers whose vision for women’s wardrobes was firmly grounded in flexibility, ease, and the democratization of style — think Claire McCardell, Bonnie Cashin, and a little later, Donna Karan and Anne Klein. Much like McCardell, Gray’s knit skirt suits never asked a woman’s body to conform to the strict dictates of a garment. Especially in the realm of eveningwear, this was a relatively foreign concept at the time. Corsets had been shed in previous decades, replaced by softer underpinnings, only to be effectively reintroduced by the structured ensembles of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

St. John for Cates First Avenue Advertisement, March 1981. Via Town and Country

St. John for Neiman Marcus Advertisement, September 1986. Via Town and Country

St. John magazine editorials from the early 1980s featured cinematic, washed-out photographs of beautiful women with blonde Pre-Raphaelite locks; eyelids lightly dusted with shades of plum and mauve; glossy lips; and knit sets rendered in similarly bruised shades of pink and purple. By the decade’s end, this softness gave way to 40s-revival Crawford-Gilbert Adrian shoulders and waists punctuated by colossal faux-leather belts, ears clipped by black-and-gold costume jewelry that matched chunky necklaces and equally bulky wrist adornments. The brand didn’t promise a single silhouette; rather, it believed a woman could appear authoritative without sacrificing her mobility.

This is what makes it the ideal uniform for promenading a designer dog around an approximately three-million-square-foot convention center for three successive weekends. “Don’t pay attention to the shoes,” one woman told us — gesturing to her slip-on Sketchers, which recall the non-slip footwear required of food service workers. “I’m old, I’ve got foot problems, and need to be able to stand all day!” Breeder glamour, in other words, is highly strategic. And comfort is absolutely essential.

This same kind of logic animates interchangeable “accessible luxury” brands. A woman with platinum-bleached hair, topped by an Amazon feather fascinator (one of two women not in St. John, pictured above), stood with her equally platinum French bulldog perched on her right hip, in a floral-print dress in shades of flamingo pink and sky blue, sent to her by Francis Valentine. She noted that Valentine’s founder, Elyce Arons, had also co-founded Kate Spade. Kate Spade, alongside Tory Burch and Rebecca Minkoff, emerged as aspirational arbiters of American femininity, promising polish, brightness, and attainable prestige. What remains of these brands today are racks of discounted leather handbags and sweaters lining strip malls across suburban America. To the breeders, however, they remain stewards of something suitable for a weekend of showing. At Westminster, as in the mall, aspiration need not be avant-garde — it just needs to signal one’s adherence to unspoken codes. This tension between aspiration and accessibility feels entirely in keeping with the convention itself.

We assumed the spectacle was incidental, aesthetic excess without logic, a costume that had outlived its original occasion. But we were wrong. The dog, of course, must abide by a rigorous set of breed standards, measurements, and proportions calibrated to their breed-specific duties and history. But so too must their human counterpart, or the “shower,” as they’re known in the official parlance of the ring. There is technically no dress code, except that you cannot wear anything that identifies you, your kennel, or your dog. Beyond that, Westminster offers only one deliciously vague directive: “The outfit should not distract from the dog.”⁴ A guideline that presumes a shared understanding of what constitutes a distraction, which has, paradoxically, produced one of the most visually arresting spectacles, dog and human alike, in competitive sport.

The Duchess of Windsor, Wallace Simpson, at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show held at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 13, 1956. Via Newsday

The sartorial conventions of this show have long been to dress in relation to the dog: Scottish deerhound exhibitors have worn kilts and plaids. In the 1950s, the Duchess of Windsor, Wallace Simpson, frequented dog shows alongside the Duke and her cast of pugs. Simpson herself was somewhat of a fashion bluestocking, becoming a muse for early-twentieth-century avant-garde designers, most notably Elsa Schiaparelli, who in 1937 dressed her in a white floor-length gown depicting a lobster painted by Salvador Dalí, seemingly emerging from between her two legs.⁵ This erotically charged crustacean dress represents a period in which fashion and visual art converged to create a new surrealist language in the form of couture-made garments, immortalized by fashion photographers like Cecil Beaton. Other than this shockingly bawdy gown (for the 30s) and her collection of freaky, sculptural hats, Simpson’s sartorial tendencies remained markedly restrained. She was a known client of both American and French couture houses, including Mainbocher, Dior, and Givenchy, along with Schiaparelli. Her relationship with Mainbocher proved so noteworthy that he named a shade of sky-blue after her irises: “Wallis Blue.” This would be the hue of her 1937 wedding dress to Prince Edward, the Duke of Windsor.⁶

Simpson’s glamour, though, was composed to sit in the stands with her troupe, alongside fellow society women enjoying the experience. Her show outfits were a part of a social performance rather than of occupational necessity.

But she wasn’t the first to treat the Westminster stands as a stage of its own kind. When the show debuted at Gilmore’s Garden in 1877, the Times noted “many elegantly dressed ladies” among the spectators, alongside their dogs, which were “disposed to be quarrelsome, especially the big fellows,” and a mob that scattered “with indecorous haste at the unexpected growl of some ferocious-looking brute.” ⁷The dressing-up may, in fact, be the entire point.

The conditions of the show have, on occasion, procured the right ingredients for a very real, pearl-clutching scandal. JEALOUSY BELIEVED THE MOTIVE read the front-page headline of the Times on the morning of February 23rd, 1895, as eight toy dogs were found dead or dying in their benching area the morning before competition, poisoned with strychnine.⁸ While a $ 1,000 reward (worth $38,585 today) was offered for the offender, no one was ever caught. In 2010, two PETA members rushed the Best in Show ring with signs reading “Mutts Rule” before being hauled off by security. This scene echoes PETA’s earlier catwalk interventions at fashion provocateur Alexander McQueen’s Fall 2000 collection, “Eshu,” and at Dior’s Fall 2003 show, designed by the maison’s then-creative director, the equally provocative John Galliano — whether at a dog convention or a couture show, spectacle remains a site of protest.

PETA interrupts Christian Dior Fall 2003 by creative director John Galliano. Via Dazed Digital

By 1956, when Anne Rogers Clark, co-author of The International Encyclopedia of Dogs, became the first woman to win Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, handler clothing had adapted to communicate control and credibility.⁹ Images of her at shows from the 1950s through the 1960s depict her in mid-century nipped waists and full skirts, toy poodle in tow, looking polished and avoiding any provocation.¹⁰ The current ethos and iteration of dog convention dress, however, does feel like a departure from this early-to-mid-twentieth-century variation of minimal distraction from the pooch.

Anne Rogers Clark, 1950s. Via The American Kennel Club

Mrs. E.H. Berendsohn (L), owner-handler of the Japanese Spaniel ‘Kumochi No Takara,’ stands beside a table, displaying her prize-winning dog with judge Miss Anna K. Nichols at the 69th annual dog show of the Westminster Kennel Club, New York City. 13th February 1945. Via Getty Images

One of the breeders we spoke to scrolled through her camera roll to show us photos captured at a convention in Florida, where she described all the St. John suits as “more classic looking.” What she seemed to mean was 30s-40s-inspired: many of the women were crowned by feathered millinery. We asked her where the women acquired such headwear, and she responded, “probably from Amazon… where else?” It makes sense that, in pursuit of decorum, one might top a knit skirt suit with a hat, hoping to embody a kind of formality that feels lost to time, but easily reads as dignified — a kind that Simpson embodied in her long, tailor-made ensembles and her suits paired with mesh face veils worn to conventions of yesteryears. The irony here feels less mid-century couture sobriety and more surrealist mollusk dress, less like a disciplined “handler,” and much more spectacle. In a world riddled with athleisure and denim, it feels jarring to enter a space where highly adorned skirt suits prevail — outfits more formal than what most Americans wear to the office, let alone to a weekend sporting event.

While Westminster maintains a fiction of timeless decorum, the Morris and Essex Dog Show makes this historical impulse much more explicit. It’s held every five years in New Jersey and is known for being a particularly fashion-focused event: breeders lean more consciously and deliberately into this vintage bent. Originally spearheaded by Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, a wealthy breeder, dog lover, and philanthropist, the show ran for thirty years, from 1927 to 1957.¹¹ According to the American Kennel Club, when the show made its grand return in 2000, breeders and attendees alike donned both period-accurate and gloriously inaccurate reproductions spanning the 20s through the mid-century. Women in beaded flapper dresses draped in mink, austere 40s-style wartime utility ensembles, and men in striped, Fred Astaire-style suits could be seen walking the grounds. Looking at the photos from this show, one might mistake it for a vintage fashion-oriented event like the Governor’s Island Jazz Age Lawn Party or even the Manhattan Vintage Show.

Morris and Essex Dog Show, 2021. Via Dogs Outside the Ring

Morris and Essex Kennel Club Show: Zanmarakuri Ghazni rests on grass beside owner Mary Kenney of Dayton, Ohio, before his class is called at Giralda Farms,1955. Via Getty Images

Exhibitors’ dress is dictated by the culture and mythology of each event — Morris & Essex has its vintage pageantry, and Westminster, you would assume, would have a century and a half of sartorial tradition to match. It doesn’t. The present knit suit uniform has been in circulation for only about twenty-five years. Before its consolidation, Westminster’s sartorial history was a series of loose interpretations of “formalwear,” each era’s exhibitors dressing to their own moment, producing a ringside that was more idiosyncratic and eccentric, suffused with a kind of living anachronism that has since been smoothed into uniformity. What replaced it is a closed, self-referential fashion ecosystem, and for most of the show’s life, it has remained that way.

Westminster has been televised since 1948, but for most of its life, the show has existed in a kind of sealed terrarium. The breeders all know each other. They travel the same circuits and eat shrimp cocktails with the judges, repeating the same calendar year after year, ripping ribbons from each other in city after city. Off-camera, it is a small, small world. The audience was the community. The community was the audience. Then the other cameras showed up.

We noticed younger attendees toting small prosumer cameras with lav mics clipped onto dog bones and squeaky toys. A girl in sequined sweatpants was filming a grooming session as if it were a field dispatch. Another, in a chic newscaster getup with sparkly dog bone clips in her updo, was conducting interviews with handlers who seemed both flattered and faintly bewildered by the attention. We even saw the Dogist.

At this point, Breeders themselves have become content creators. New litters are announced, photographed, waitlisted, and dropped the way a fashion label releases a collection. Instagram hosts roughly two million dedicated pet influencer accounts; their engagement rates triple those of human creators, which says something, though we’re not sure what.¹²

The economics underneath the breeding itself are less aspirational. Finishing a championship on a single dog can run upward of $15,000 in entry fees, travel, and handler costs. A litter from a reputable breeder, sold at $2,000 to $5,000 per puppy, rarely recoups the investment.¹³ Thanks to the breeder and prolific blogger operating under the name “Prism Goldens” on a Golden Retriever breeding forum, we got the inside scoop on what the financials really look like. Progesterone tests cost $80 to $200 each (and you might need ten). There’s a vague “stud fee.” FedExing the semen, $200. Getting it in the dog, $100 for an AI or $1,000 for a surgical procedure. The dewormings, the whelping box, and a patch of linoleum flooring. “I am certain I left out a ton of things,” she wrote, “but a litter is not really a huge moneymaker if you do it right.” She flags: “If the bitch is titled, you have to figure that in too.”

Most breeders we spoke with said they’d never turned a profit on the dogs alone. The sponsored posts, the brand partnerships, the appearance fees at events like this, that is what keeps the operation solvent.¹⁴ The dogs fund the content that funds the dogs.

The whole arrangement recalled another hyper-feminized, hyper-capitalized ritual. In 2022, sorority recruitment at the University of Alabama went viral on TikTok, for the BTS side of the whole operation. In How to build a girl in Modern America for The Face, Biz Sherbert describes this fashion phenomenon aptly as a distinctly American sport: Girls with dyson-curled bleach blonde locks, faces “baked” with powder, meticulously dress themselves in pre-planned outfits unveiled day-by-day via short-form video online, in a weeklong pageant of self-fashioning and presentation.

Westminster has its own version of this. Grooming stations double as content studios: garment bags are theatrically unzipped for the camera, curlers and straightening irons are used, and backup suits are lovingly produced on cue. However aesthetically distinct, a St. John’s Dog Show woman and a Bama Rush girl share the labor of curating a feminine ideal of beauty, evoking pageantry, ballroom theatrics, and a rigid formality that defined the days of ladies corseted by highly structured underpinnings and costly hair styles disciplined and maintained by silk hair scarves. As Biz remarks, “But there it was, in our world of smartphones and women wearing jorts to the office.”¹⁵ Her astonishment at sorority girls in their coordinated ensembles articulated by mass luxury goods feels akin to the sensorial experience of descending the escalators of Westminster, and being slapped in the face with crystallized hot-pink skirt suits worn by a sea of middle-aged women trotting around magnificently groomed canines, against a backdrop of a royal-purple low-pile carpet.

At Bama, as at every other university with sororities, incoming rushees are paired with sorority “bigs,” older “sisters” who mentor them through recruitment, model the dress code, and teach the implicit rules. At Westminster, there is a Junior Showmanship competition for children aged 9 to 17.¹⁶ Instead of judging the dogs, the kids are assessed on the quality of their presentation, poise, and handling. The pageant reproduces itself by reinstating the discipline and connecting them with mentors; each generation rehearses the codes of the ring before they are old enough to be in it for real.

It was surprising to find the younger generations not trying to “disrupt” anything — but then, their individualism is the exact opposite of what they’re judged on. The anti-fashion ethos that tends to animate girls whose mothers dressed under strict dictates of femininity was nowhere to be seen.

“Fashion is an important microcosm of the show,” Martha told us, with the serenity of someone stating the self-evident. She is right, though the word microcosm undersells it. This is a world in which a Yorkshire Terrier’s three-hour beauty routine is unremarkable, rhinestoned knits are simply what one wears, and the collective pursuit of an almost untranslatable ideal of excellence has been ongoing, uninterrupted, for a hundred and fifty years. The people on the inside have long since been unable to see it from the outside. The broader culture organizes its relationship to dress around refusal — the self announced through deviation, the silhouette that argues with its predecessors, the daughter’s wardrobe as a rebuke of the mother’s. But Westminster runs on the opposite epistemology.

We watched a seventeen-year-old and a fourteen-year-old run their dogs around the ring with the same studied poise as the women three decades their senior. Afterward, we asked where they got their suits. They looked at each other and smiled, before responding in sync: “St. John.” Obviously.

Somewhere in the arena, a procession of beagles is moving toward the ready ring. Each one is an edition of the ideal, with the same ear length, chest depth, and expression of uncomplicated readiness. Each animal is selected, bred, and concocted across generations to assemble a creature so precisely synthesized it has come to resemble not a dog but the idea of one, a Frankenstein-like miracle, manifested in the whelping box. The dogs do not know they are perfect. They simply are. They have been brushed to look like dogs that were brushed. And the women walking alongside them have spent years working toward an equivalent pedigree, in their rhinestone-clad, Sketcher-wearing, Bumpit-boosted kind of way. Dangling about their necks are gold necklaces of Best in Show prize ribbons, set with rubies, sapphires, and diamonds as tiny glittery records of rings they’ve already conquered. For any one of them, today could be the best day of their life.

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor, no. 18 (September 1898), accessed February 25, 2026. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/bulletin-united-states-bureau-labor-3943/september-1898-477571.

2. “The Great Bench Show: Preparing for the Opening; All the Out-of-Town Dogs at Gilmore’s Garden,” New York Times, May 8, 1877, accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/1877/05/08/archives/the-great-bench-show-preparing-for-the-opening-all-the-outoftown.html.

3. St. John Knits. “Our Story.” St. John Knits, accessed February 25, 2026. https://stjohnknits.com/pages/our-story?srsltid=AfmBOoow5VBynbZBDRi8X6oO6O5tX5hEoElAJS3LxdldDS6eTL4TRN5O

4. American Kennel Club, “Unspoken Etiquette,” accessed February 23, 2026, https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/sports/unspoken-etiquette/.

5. Allen, Olivia. “The Story Behind Wallis Simpson’s Erotically Charged Schiaparelli Lobster Dress.” Vogue UK, July 18, 2025. accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/schiaparelli-lobster-dress-wallis-simpson

6. De la Haye, Amy, and Valerie D. Mendes. Fashion Since 1900. London: Thames & Hudson, 2010.

7. “The Great Bench Show: Preparing for the Opening; All the Out-of-Town Dogs at Gilmore’s Garden,” New York Times, May 8, 1877, accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/1877/05/08/archives/the-great-bench-show-preparing-for-the-opening-all-the-outoftown.html.

8. “Prize Dogs Poisoned: Eight of Mrs. Senn’s Pets Killed by a Miscreant; A Reward Offered,” New York Times, February 23, 1895, accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/1895/02/23/archives/prize-dogs-poisoned-eight-of-mrs-senns-pets-killed-by-a-miscreant-a.html.

9. “Anne Rogers Clark.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified April 23, 2024, accessed February 25, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Rogers_Clark

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11. Haid, Melanie. “The Tradition of Iconic Vintage Fashion at the Morris & Essex Dog Show.” American Kennel Club, October 6, 2025, accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/morris-essex-dog-show-fashion/

12. “How to Become a Pet Influencer,” impact.com, accessed February 23, 2026, https://impact.com/influencer/how-to-become-a-pet-influencer/.

13. Golden Prisms, “How Much Profit for New Litter?,” Golden Retriever Forum, July 20, 2016, accessed February 25, 2026. https://www.goldenretrieverforum.com/threads/how-much-profit-for-new-litter.501540/.

14. Saurabh Chaturvedi, “Pet Influencer Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide for Brands and Pet Owners,” RecurPost (blog), accessed February 23, 2026, https://recurpost.com/blog/pet-influencer/#elementor-toc__heading-anchor-2.

15. Sherbert, Biz. “How to Build a Girl in Modern America.” The Face (winter 25 issue), January 6, 2026, accessed February 25, 2026. https://theface.com/society/rushtok-sorority-kylan-izzy-darnell-sisters-university-of-alabama-american-girlhood

16. American Kennel Club, “Junior Showmanship,” accessed February 23, 2026, https://www.akc.org/sports/conformation/junior-showmanship/.