Riding boots, tweed, silk scarves with horse-bit prints and leather that smells of saddle. Every season some fashion house "discovers" the equestrian aesthetic, and this autumn Chloé and Stella McCartney put it into their autumn-winter 2026-2027 collections. But behind the trend there's no love of horses. There's something much older - the need to show which side of the fence you stand on.

The history is clear. Since ancient Greece, riding has been a mark of aristocracy and education, and later it became a mandatory part of the portrait of power. In 1799, Goya painted Spain's Queen Maria Luisa on horseback. Eugénie de Montijo, Empress Sisi, Elizabeth II and Princess Anne all wore the saddle as part of their public identity. Fashion psychology reads this without romance: equestrian culture is "a visible sign of belonging to the elite", built on class distinctions that still let almost nobody through.

Today's faces of the trend confirm the thesis. Charlotte Casiraghi, an ambassador for Gucci and Chanel, opened a Chanel haute couture show on horseback. Marta Ortega is an experienced rider, and Athina Onassis, granddaughter of shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, is a name in equestrian sport. These are not weekend riders. For them, the stable is an extension of the living room.

The brands turned this into money long ago. Hermès was built on making horse tack and leather goods. Gucci's icon is the horse-bit buckle, the Horsebit, on which an entire line of bags rests. Longchamp bears the name of the famous Parisian racecourse, and Longines has been the official timekeeper of equestrian sport since 1912 and a partner of the International Equestrian Federation since 2013. The horse, in other words, isn't decoration - it's a business model.

In the Balkans, the horse was for a long time a working tool - for ploughing and for pulling the cart on market day - not a status symbol. Which makes it almost ironic that the same horse now comes back to us through a label, as a memory of a class our grandparents never belonged to. A riding boot is a good boot, and there's nothing wrong with wearing one. It's just worth knowing what you're really buying: not comfort for the muddy road to the village, but a small dose of somebody else's aristocracy.