We are two months past the Kentucky Derby, but the big race makes news all year round.

Last Wednesday, the Kentucky Derby Museum revealed its new exhibit, See and be seen 150 years of Derby fashion.

It shows the progression of fashion from before the Kentucky Derby to the present day.

And horse racing just internationally have been tied together for centuries.

And really, because horse racing was so associated with the social elite.

Coming to the racetrack to show off the latest trends was just sort of par for the course.

The Kentucky Derby coming dressed beautifully, dressed in wonderful hats.

That was what was expected of you to come to the Kentucky Derby for many, many years, 100 years of fashion history.

That's a lot of research.

That's a lot of sorting through photos and sorting through all all different kinds of trends and journalism.

So it's been a really fun about year and a half trying to conceive exactly what story we were trying to tell, which individual stories we could tell with the ensembles we had available to us, and coming at it from a historical perspective, it's been so fascinating because there are amazing things that you can read sociologically and culturally into what people choose to wear because really fashion is a form of communicating.

It's a way of telling the world what's what's important to us.

A lot of the ensembles you'll see in this exhibit are pieces that are newly acquired for a permanent collection.

We were very fortunate to work with the Kentucky Science Center to bring a lot of the items that they were removing from their collection and transfer it into ours.

We've also worked with historic institutions like the Filson Historical Society and the Kentucky Historical Society to bring this amazing range of items from 150 years of Derby.

We have pieces dating back to the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, which is incredible because it helps us tell the story of racing in Kentucky before the Kentucky Derby and show how racing in Kentucky has always been about looking your best at the race.

We really wanted to engender that community spirit, bring that into the way that we were telling the derby story and really get the community involved.

And so we held a fashion contest in 2023 and we were really impressed at the range of items that we received from that contest.

They were so colorful, so creative, so beautiful.

The combinations were so wonderful, and it gave us an opportunity to really showcase the, you know, imagination of the people who come to the Kentucky Derby and what goes into creating a perfect ensemble or a perfect derby hat.

We tried to really tell stories that are not just talking about, you know, the the elite, the fashion elite, but everyday people, people that maybe, you know, you may know some of these people who entered the fashion contest.

You may come and say, I know her.

I saw her.

You know, we want to have that kind of recognition because really our job is to make history relevant and make history interesting to what you care about.

And so we hope that you walk into this and not only feel like you're walking through history, getting a wonderful lesson of how fashion has evolved at the Kentucky Derby, but that you're also sort of walking through your own derby crowd.

Not everybody has the opportunity to go to the Kentucky Derby, and a lot of our visitors are from out of state as well.

So this is a chance for them to have Derby every day and to come here and walk through a Derby crowd and see those amazing outfits.

Although this exhibit is temporary, it is set to become permanent ahead of the Kentucky Derby Museum's 40th anniversary next year, and it will run until next year as 151st Derby.