The Most Joyful Hats of NYC’s Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival
From artwork tributes to miniature landmarks, this year’s event brought together the quirky, camp, and fantastical in what one participant called “a love-fest.”
Christ is risen, and so too has the average height of New Yorkers’ hats, at least at this year’s Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival.
Residents (and their dogs) flocked to the steps of the towering St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Sunday, April 20, to flaunt extravagant lids, some several feet high, for the highly anticipated annual event. From 10am to 4pm, participants filled the streets wearing real-life Chinese take-out containers, entire miniature cities balanced on the crowns of heads, and political drag, among other highlights.
Emerging after the Civil War, the annual creative hat festival along Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue began as a “fashion promenade” of wealthy New Yorkers departing from their religious services wearing the newest trending clothes. Nearly 150 years later, the parade is no longer centered on flaunting high fashion, transformed instead into a pageant where the quirky, camp, and fantastical descend on one of the city’s most iconic worship landmarks.
Chelsea Cooksey, an arts professional who has attended the parade for four years, gathered 15 friends and family members for this weekend’s event and asked them to select their favorite works of art as inspiration for their bonnets.
“You have to go with the most prescient current art, and also some of the oldest,” Cooksey, whose bonnet recreated a miniature Christo and Jeanne-Claude “The Gates” (2005) installation, told Hyperallergic.
One member of Cooksey’s group wore a bowler hat supporting a duct-taped banana in a nod to Maurizio Cattelan’s notorious $6.2 million “Comedian” (2019). Another member of the group showed off a Dalí-style warped clock on his head. In a tribute to René Magritte’s “Son of Man” (1964), another member of Cooksey’s posse walked the streets with a green apple in front of his eyes.
One of the most finely detailed bonnets to appear in the procession belonged to Gina Kim, who stood confidently in one place as photographers took turns capturing the partially 3-D printed miniature maquette of New York City sitting on her head.
Kim, who is an annual participant in the parade, told Hyperallergic that the festival marks the end of winter and a reemergence for New Yorkers.
“It’s a positively charged environment, and people are telling each other how great they look,” Kim said.
On the other end of the festival, Ed Woodham, creator of the public project Art in Odd Places, sat in a chair he brought in front of Saks Fifth Avenue wearing heaps of tulle fabric. Woodham said he sits in this spot every year during the parade, which he calls “New York-centric.”
“Regardless of all the crap that’s going on in the world right now, people are smiling. All the different people that are here are all smiling at each other,” Woodham said. “It’s a love-fest.”
Hairdresser Jerry Stacey and visual artist Debra Roth, donning sprigs of flowers and poofy hats, could barely take one step in front of Rockefeller Center without tourists and journalists hounding them for photos. Roth said she wanted to symbolize rebirth and regrowth with her costume. Nearby, a group of Italian tourists partook in the festivities with a tour guide.
On the steps of the cathedral, costume designer and performance artist Davey Mitchell dressed in a gown adorned with art inspired by Keith Haring, who Mitchell said was his friend in the ’80s.
Politics were inescapable at this year’s bonnet parade. One promenader wore a “Hands Off!” protest sign, and another hatter portrayed President Trump, Elon Musk, and Vice President JD Vance wearing their own bonnets, bearing symbols of violence such as swastikas, guns, and money. Invoking the Statue of Liberty, one woman’s costume called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
A group of protesters affiliated with the New York Catholic Worker movement attended the parade — accidentally. They frequent the church, they said, calling on the Archbishop of New York to recognize Israel’s violence in Gaza as a genocide, in line with resolutions by several human rights organizations.
“A lot of people are stopping to notice,” Bernie Connaughton, holding a sign advocating for peace in Gaza, told Hyperallergic.
Friends Joy and Ellen, spectators who asked to be identified by their first names, told Hyperallergic the parade put a smile on their faces in a world that they feel less frequently does so.
“It’s whimsical, it’s wonderful, it’s a great reprieve,” Joy said.
