A stuffed pigeon in sunglasses and a tiny Mets cap, perched amid a cascade of faux coffee and a half-eaten pizza, was among the most talked-about creations at this year’s Fifth Avenue Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival — the century-and-a-half-old New York tradition that each spring turns 49th to 57th streets into a moving stage for outrageous headwear. The pigeon-topped bonnet, built by toy designer Gina Kim of Sunnyside, Queens, reworked the city’s detritus into spectacle: an open pizza box, a sidewalk-vendor cup that appears to spill coffee down Kim’s hair, and other “iconic NYC garbage” arranged around the bird.
Kim, who has taken part in the parade for nearly a decade, said she approaches her bonnets like micro art installations. “If you ever want to know what it’s like to be a celebrity, you put on a really nice hat and you go to the Easter Bonnet Parade,” she told the New York Post, describing how spectators swarm for pictures. She said she is stopped for “easily over 100 photos” during the Sunday stroll and has previously adorned her hats with everything from a box of Tide detergent to a spinny NYC sign; one past effort included a miniature laundry line with a 3D-printed basket produced by a friend to get the details right.
The parade’s amateur millinery often runs in family or community traditions. Art teacher James Haggerty and his 13-year-old daughter, Zoe, spend months sketching and refining ideas, Haggerty said, “chewing on the idea for a good six months” before building the bonnet each year. Their most talked-about years included a duo of food-themed creations: Zoe wearing a Chinese takeout container while Haggerty donned a giant fortune cookie that dispensed fortunes to onlookers, and another year when Zoe was a plate of spaghetti and meatballs and Haggerty a cheese grater. Last year the pair “took it to a whole other level” by handing out souvenirs; this year’s concept was being held as a surprise.
Other participants have turned sheer eccentricity into viral moments. Brooklyn actor Jairus Abts drew wide attention in 2019 when he hollowed out and painted 76 real eggs and mounted them in a crate on his head. The preparation took weeks — “every single morning I’d blow out like two or three eggs and hang on to them,” he recalled — and the finished piece proved almost immovable in the crowd. Abts said he had to remove the hat to exit the parade because he couldn’t walk “two feet without getting stopped for pictures,” only to put it back on at a Hell’s Kitchen bar where patrons loved it.
The parade, which traces its roots to the 1870s, continues to function as both a public runway and a form of popular theatre: participants spend months constructing elaborate bonnets that riff on city life, food, fashion and personal jokes, while spectators and photographers turn the procession into an interactive performance. For many, the point is the exchange — of smiles, photographs, and in some cases, physical tokens like fortunes or souvenirs — that makes the stroll down Fifth Avenue feel like a brief, participatory pageant of New York identity.
This year’s entries, from Kim’s pigeon-and-pizza tableau to Haggerty and Zoe’s long-running family experiments and Abts’ famously fragile-egg headpiece, underlined how the century-old parade has remained a laboratory for costume craftsmanship and, in equal measure, for New York’s particular brand of humor and showmanship.