When Carson Kressley, the fashion guru of the Bravo TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” comes to the Pennsylvania National Horse Show at the Farm Show Complex and Expo Center in Harrisburg this weekend, he’ll have the same problems everyone else has. “People ask me if I get the VIP treatment and I say no,” Kressley says laughing. “I still have trouble finding a parking place, just like everybody else.”

He might be famous these days, but you wouldn’t know it at the horse show, which is considered one of the biggest events in the equestrian world. “Nobody treats me any differently. I’ve been coming here for at least 20 years,” he says. “The horse show community is like my extended family. I’ve known these people for so long.”

Kressley, who will be competing in the show in the Saddlebred category, is a nationally ranked equestrian and a former member of the U.S. World-Cup Equestrian Team. He’ll be joining close to 1,200 other riders during the week-long event, which begins today and runs through next Saturday. Riders and horses will be competing in almost a dozen national championships, with $340,000 in prize money at stake.

On Saturday, which has been dubbed Kids First Saturday, there will be free pony rides and the Adequan/USEF National Jumper Championships. Next Saturday, champion rider Stacy Westfall will give freestyle reining demonstrations and next Friday and Saturday there will be border collie herding demonstrations.

Also next Saturday will be Grand Prix & Championship Night, which will include the saddlebred championship, where you can see Kressley ride. “The Pennsylvania show is one of the biggest and the best,” Kressley says. “There are Olympic-level riders here. And shows are very romantic. Not in a romance novel kind of way, but they hearken back to a simpler time and the world of athletics, the communication between horse and rider.”

Kressley, who grew up in the Lehigh Valley and graduated Magna Cum Laude, and Phi Beta Cappa from Gettysburg College, has been riding all his life. “My grandparents were in the Shetland pony business and my sister and I would go to horse shows with them. I remember going to the Manheim horse auction a lot when I was a kid. My sister and I have been doing this for 30 years,” Kressley says, adding with a laugh, “I know I look like I’m only 21.” (He’s actually 37.)

How did a horseman get to be a fashion guru? After graduating in 1991, Kressley got a job with the United States Equestrian Federation, which is headquartered in New York. “A man can not live on non-profit wages alone,” Kressley says. “I was always interested in fashion and clothes and a friend who worked at Ralph Lauren helped me get a job there. Soon I was getting coffee for some of the most important people in the industry.”

It didn’t take too long for the witty Kressley to move up the fashion ladder and he began working as an assistant to Ralph’s brother, Jerry Lauren.

So how did Kressley go from folding sweaters to becoming a TV star? “I was working in the advertising department and one of the producers who helped set up a photo shoot, told me about this Bravo show they were planning. Now I thought Bravo was a nonstick cooking spray or a kind of Microwave popcorn. I’d never heard of it.”

But he went ahead and tried out for the pilot. With his quick wit and excellent fashion sense, he easily won a spot among the fab five. The shoots are intense and require a lot of preparation. And despite the sense that it’s all taking place in one day, Kressley says it usually takes three days to shoot everything. “It’s like a day in August in Sweden,” he jokes. “It’s a very long day.”