Evetta Petty Is Bringing Harlem to the Royals

Evetta Petty, the milliner behind Harlem’s Heaven Hats, always dreamed of one day attending the Royal Ascot races in England. Royal weddings aside, Ascot is the epicenter of extravagant millinery design. But race season is an exceptionally busy time for milliners, Petty says, “I just never really had the time.”

This year, she’s made room on her calendar. The Royal Ascot annually selects and spotlights around a dozen emerging and established milliners from Britain and beyond, who each add an exclusive design to Ascot’s permanent collection. A few months ago, the 66-year-old designer, whose hats have been featured in TV shows like Cake Boss, The Equalizer, and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, on the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and in the 2019 Milliners Guild exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, received an email asking her to be part of the Royal Ascot Millinery Collective 2024 and to create an original design. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” Petty tells me from her shop in Harlem. “I had to read it over and over again.”

Petty will be the first Black milliner in history to join the Royal Ascot Millinery Collective and the only American representative this year. She will follow in the steps of world-renowned milliners such as Philip Treacy and Stephen Jones. “It’s such a major milestone,” Petty says. “Not just for me, but for the community I will be representing.”

Born and raised in the South, Petty grew up admiring the elaborate accessorizing of her local church ladies. But it was the summers spent in New York City with her aunt Eva that first introduced Petty to the world of capital-F Fashion. A nurse working in cancer research, Eva had a penchant for fashion and would take little Evetta along to glamorous receptions and luncheons or evening classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. For Christmas, she’d gift her niece things like kits to make her own handbags. “My aunt recognized my talent early on and encouraged it,” says Petty, who began selling self-made jewelry to her aunt’s sorority sisters at 10 years old.

After high school, Petty moved to New York to study textiles and fashion marketing at FIT; becoming a milliner had never been the plan. “I worked behind the scenes for different fashion companies for years,” Petty says. Making hats was something she did for herself on the side. “People were always saying, ‘What a cute hat, where can I get one?’” Petty says. Encouraged by her aunt, she began selling some of her designs at a pop-up market in Soho on the weekends. It didn’t take long before Petty quit her day job to go into the hat-making business full time.

She initially rented a small space at the Soho Emporium, “a kind of mini-mall with lots of up-and-coming designers,” in the late 1980s. Five years later, it was time to expand her customer base, which Petty found in Harlem’s churchgoing community. “I grew up in Alabama and Florida, where we always dressed up for church on Sundays and Easter,” Petty says. “Hats are an important part of that.” Harlem proved to be a natural fit, providing a welcoming home to Harlem’s Heaven Hats for over 30 years now.

Petty’s whimsical designs are marked by her intuitive and playful approach to millinery. She doesn’t make sketches, instead manipulating material until it looks and feels right. “I think of myself more as an artist making wearable art,” Petty says, admitting that she has “never taken a millinery class in my life.” This lack of classical training allows her to freely experiment. Drawing inspiration from architecture and travels to Tokyo, India, and Hong Kong, Petty enjoys using unconventional materials, whether that’s shower curtains, handbags, rugs, or copper wiring from the back of a refrigerator: “I always say, ‘I’ll make a hat out of anything!’”

For her original Ascot design, Petty looked to Harlem’s rich cultural history. “I wanted to create something that reflected the music, the jazz, the community,” she says. After the Royal Ascot team pointed out several designs they especially liked from her collection, Petty went with a powder-blue straw base with two big white flowers set in the middle, aptly named “The Blue Note.”

Petty has also been busy thinking about the hats she will wear herself when she attends the races this month, watching from the Royal Enclosure. She’s planning three fascinators with luscious feathers, color coordinated to each day’s outfit. “The first day I’m wearing hot pink, the second day lime green, the third royal blue,” Petty tells me.

Aside from it being a major and unexpected honor, Petty hopes that her being selected will give a new boost to her business. “Running a brick-and-mortar store isn’t always easy,” she says, “especially since the pandemic.” This will allow her to tap deeper into the international market and work with new clients. But first, she’ll get to meet her international peers and sit side by side with the royals. As Petty says: “It should be a lot of fun.”