It’s a crisp, sunny morning in late March, 40 days until the Kentucky Derby.
I’m in a small midtown Manhattan studio, in a showroom filled to the brim with towers of handmade hats. One of the projects on this week’s docket: A hat requiring 150 handmade silk roses, one for each year of the Kentucky Derby’s unbroken history. Each rose is individually cut and sewn here on site.
“We’ve made 44 roses so far,” says Carol Sulla, director of operations and sales for Christine A. Moore Millinery.
Which leaves “only” 106 roses to be sewn before the first Saturday in May.
Christine Moore is the woman behind many of the Derby’s most coveted hats. She built her early career working on Broadway shows before opening her own shop and focusing on millinery, the craft of hat-making. Moore was the first featured milliner for the Kentucky Derby and received the commission of “Kentucky Colonel” from Governor Andy Beshear in 2022.
The celebrities who have worn her hats top the A-List — Katy Perry and Jennifer Lopez are among her numerous clients — and Moore’s hats have made appearances in shows like Gossip Girl, Nashville and The Carrie Diaries. During Derby hat season, which roughly starts in January, they’ll ship out upwards of 1,000 hats, all designed and crafted here in this small studio.
And now I’m here to find my Derby hat.
Patty Ethington in 2009, wearing a Christine A. Moore hat that would one day sit in the Kentucky Derby Museum. (AP Photo / Patti Longmire)
It’s possible that Moore’s most famous hat was a Kentucky Derby commission in 2009. Worn by Patty Ethington of Shelbyville, Ky., the red hat was designed to look like a massive flower and could fit three people under its brim. A photo from the day went viral, and the rest is — almost literally — history: The hat ended up in the Kentucky Derby Museum for 10 years. Ethington is now known for her larger-than-life Derby hats. “The bigger, the better,” she says.
This year, for the 150th anniversary of the Derby, Ethington broke out the big red hat and is bringing it back.
“The very first one that Christine made for me is the one I’m redoing this year,” Ethington tells me. She and Moore worked together to adapt the hat to a new outfit without making any irreversible changes. “We’re putting black in the hat, so I can just add a little bit of a different flair to it, but I can still bring it back to the original red hat that was in the museum.”
For Derby attendees, the dress-to-the-nines fashion game is as much a draw as the race itself — and honoring history is a big part of their calculations, especially on its 150th anniversary.
“I probably started planning my outfit for the Derby three months ago, and I knew I wanted to pay tribute to the Derby,” says Priscilla Turner, another client of Moore’s. “I really wanted to match the caliber that I know other people are coming with.”
A Singer sewing machine sits in Christine Moore’s millinery studio in New York.
For Moore, prepping her clients for “The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports” involves hundreds of hours of meticulous planning and exacting work.