POLE POSITION, FRONT ROW : How Formula 1 Became Fashion's Biggest Runway
- Trudy Giordano
- 17 hours ago
- 8 min read
July 30th 2026. By Trudy Giordano
Marks & Spencer built a runway inside a working Formula 1 pit lane three weeks ago. I caught the YouTube clips this week, and I haven't quite been able to let them go since.
Not near it. Not inspired by it. Inside it. At the British Grand Prix, fifty models walked the actual Silverstone garages, past the actual team cars, in the actual space where mechanics change actual tires in under two seconds, wearing a summer collection called "Dress to Thrill." First fashion show ever staged directly on an F1 pit lane. Won't be the last, either. M&S has already signed a multi-year deal with the circuit and became Williams's official travel-kit partner this year, a sentence that would've made no sense to anyone a decade ago and now barely gets a second look.
That's what actually stopped me, honestly. Not the clothes. The fact that none of us blinked.
Though the show itself is worth a second look, too, and not an entirely flattering one. M&S called it "a landmark moment," "a really bold step," "delivering something no one has done before." M&S's own official upload of the full four-minute show sits at 1,800 views after two weeks. One comment. Two mechanics in matching black jumpsuits walk right behind the models for a stretch of it, holding up a checkered flag, roughly the image a five-year-old would draw if you asked them to sketch "racing." Somewhere between the press release and the room, something got lost.
THE INFRASTRUCTURE
Because once I started actually looking, I realized this wasn't one show. The sport's been quietly, systematically dressing itself up for years, and even "dressing up" undersells it. That's not decoration, that's structural. Louis Vuitton hand-crafts twenty-four bespoke trophy trunks a season, one per circuit, each built around the host country's own identity. Monaco's has the track's actual nineteen turns mapped inside it, Saudi Arabia's carries a "V" meant to evoke desert heat and night-race velocity. The Dutch Grand Prix trophy itself, separate from its case, is a ceramic cup hand-painted by Royal Delft's own artisans, which I genuinely did not expect to find and now can't stop bringing up. LVMH is Monaco's title partner. TAG Heuer is the official timekeeper. Richard Mille sponsors two rival teams simultaneously and has built one-of-one watches for specific drivers. Charles Leclerc has his own Richard Mille, engineered and named for him. None of this is a metaphor I'm reaching for. It's just the infrastructure now.
THE SPECTACLE
And that's before the music even starts. Singapore pioneered trackside concerts back in 2008 and has since grown into four stages and over 100 hours of performances in one weekend, featuring artists such as Lana Del Rey, Janet Jackson, and DJ Snake. Las Vegas just signed the Backstreet Boys for an official afterparty inside Sphere. There's a published, dedicated guide, with its own separate ticketing logic, for attending a Formula 1 Grand Prix specifically to skip the Formula 1. I had to read that one twice. The sport publishes guidance on attending it without watching it.
THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE
If any of this feels like a recent invasion, fashion photobombing a previously pure sport, I want to correct that, because it isn't new, gently. It's a rerun, and a pretty exact one. In 1986, an Italian knitwear company called Benetton bought a struggling team named Toleman, renamed it after itself, and ran it as a full owner and constructor for fifteen seasons, winning Michael Schumacher's first two World Championships along the way. Small world moment I genuinely didn't see coming while researching this: one of the drivers on that Benetton roster was a young Jos Verstappen, Max's father, which means his son's own fashion deal isn't just an echo of this history, it's a literal family rerun. A clothing brand didn't sponsor a car back then. It built one and won with it. One retrospective I found put the obvious comparison better than I could: twenty years before an energy drink company turned a mediocre team into Red Bull Racing, a fashion label got there first, and did it more completely. Red Bull owning a constructor reads as unremarkable to us now. A knitwear company doing the identical thing in 1986 read as insane, right up until it started winning.
WHAT GOT LOST
Even the suits have a history. I wasn't expecting to find this funny. Juan Manuel Fangio won five championships in the 1950s, racing in a polo shirt and a work jacket. Fire-retardant material only became mandatory in 1963, and even then, it was cotton, which is to say barely retardant at all, until Niki Lauda's near-fatal 1976 crash forced the sport into real, five-layer Nomex protection. By the eighties, tobacco money had turned every suit into a walking billboard, patches thick enough to add real physical weight to a driver's shoulders.
And somewhere in there, I found this: the sport's laurel wreath, the actual ancient symbolic honor for winning, quietly disappeared from the podium. Not banned or retired for being old-fashioned or removed, because it kept blocking the sponsor logos on the suits during the photographs.
An actual honor, physically edited out of a ceremony, because it was in the way of the branding.
I keep coming back to that one. An actual honor, physically edited out of a ceremony, because it was in the way of the branding. If I had to put this whole piece in one sentence, that's probably the sentence.
Photographed at the 2022 Formula E NYC ePrix, Red Hook, Brooklyn. António Félix da Costa, Stoffel Vandoorne, and Mitch Evans on the podium.
WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS
None of this is really an argument against fashion. It's an argument about what happens when something real, old, and human is discovered as a revenue stream.
Because the underlying impulse here is real, and I don't want to mock it. What we wear is one of the oldest, most reliable ways any of us find our own people, signaling who we are before we've said a word. Psychologists have a term for the effect it has on the wearer, specifically: "enclothed cognition." The clothes don't just tell other people who you are. They change how you experience being you that day. That's not shallow to me. It's close to the opposite.
To me, though, there's something about the way all this is presented that's less "join the party" and more "here's the velvet rope, and by the way, the dress code is whatever we say it is this week." It's fashion as passive-aggressive bouncer, smiling just enough to remind you that, no, you're not really on the list, but isn't it adorable you thought you might be? Inclusivity is the slogan, but exclusivity is the policy, and the undercurrent is about as subtle as a branded champagne shower.
THE DRIVERS KNOW
When I look at Lewis Hamilton treating every race weekend like his own fashion week, Saint Laurent, a sequined runway piece from an Italian designer's spring collection, an oversized pastel suit with a cape draped over it at Monaco, I don't read that as vanity so much as someone using the one language he fully controls in a sport where almost everything else is engineered by other people. We all know, of course, that Max Verstappen is one of F1's great fashion obsessives. (He very much isn't, and that's rather the joke. Verstappen has a well-documented aversion to fashion duties and would much rather skip the branded photo ops altogether.) Max Verstappen, doing the deliberate opposite, three collections deep into MAXRAW, his own line with G-Star built entirely around the words "real" and "raw," is making an equally specific argument, just the other one: that authenticity, not transformation, is his actual brand. Charles Leclerc runs his own apparel label and co-designs his own jewelry with genuine creative input, not a logo slapped on someone else's product. The grid's youngest addition, Kimi Antonelli, became a tourism ambassador for Dozza, the small Italian town near his hometown, leaning into heritage and craft instead of either extreme.
THE WOMEN IN THE FRAME
I don't want the women in this piece to only be partners, though, because that's not actually the whole picture. F1 Academy, the sport's own all-women development series, just landed Sephora as an official partner this year, complete with "Glam Bars" at eighteen race weekends and its own Sephora-liveried car for driver Natalia Granada, following Charlotte Tilbury's turn as partner the two seasons before. At this year's Canadian Grand Prix, Disney launched something called the Minnie Collective for the series, specifically introduced by F1 Academy's own Managing Director, Susie Wolff, explicitly to celebrate "a new generation of women who are natural leaders and unapologetically ambitious and confident." Also on sale that weekend: a hundred-and-fifty-dollar Minnie Mouse hoodie. I genuinely can't decide if that's a contradiction or just this whole piece's argument stated as plainly as it's ever going to get.
The women around the men deserve to be named as more than plus-ones, too, because that's not what they are either. Kelly Piquet was a stylist's assistant at Vogue Latinoamérica and a couture buyer at Bergdorf Goodman before any of this, and she's now a Marie Claire columnist with her own Vogue Netherlands cover and a real, ongoing relationship with Louis Vuitton, a career I think would exist with or without the driver attached to it. Alexandra Leclerc released an actual twenty-one-piece collection with Frame, timed deliberately to a Grand Prix weekend, not a red-carpet appearance but a genuine collaboration.
WHERE THIS ENDS
So here's where I've landed. Formula 1 didn't stumble into fashion. It rediscovered a relationship it's had since the 1980s, at exactly the moment it needed a new way to sell people something they already wanted: to feel like they belonged to something, dressed as it mattered. None of this is really about clothes, I don't think. It's about the oldest, most human thing there is, finding your people by what they wear, feeling like yourself in the right jacket, and Formula 1 has figured out, with real precision, how to charge admission to that feeling. The pit lane didn't become a runway because racing needed one. It became a runway because someone noticed we'd pay to stand near it.
But with each new partnership and every additional branded moment, it's worth asking whether something essential is being traded away. Is the spectacle enhancing the sport, or is the sport now simply scaffolding for the spectacle? The line grows thinner, and the question more urgent, as the balance tips ever further toward branding. The risk isn't that F1 might one day lose its purity, but that it might already has, quietly, when nobody blinked.
Which leaves me with the only question I actually think is worth asking. Not whether F1 should be doing this. It clearly works, and it has always. Just how far it can keep going before the thing it's selling and the thing it's supposedly still about finish trading places entirely. I'd ask the laurel wreath how that tends to end, if anyone could still find one.
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