It may be surprising that the Palais Galliera, one of the world’s foremost fashion museums, hasn’t staged an exhibition on hats in 40 years. What’s not surprising: that it’s deemed the milliner Stephen Jones worthy of this honor.
“Stephen Jones: Chapeaux d’Artiste,” which opens on Saturday as Paris buzzes with people in town for the twin Paris Art Basel and Design Miami Paris fairs, puts the English hat maker’s boundless imagination on full display. But it also reveals how Jones’s mastery for millinery has run parallel to a thrilling life he cultivated from the time he was a student. Moving to London, spending days at St. Martins and nights at the Blitz club meant he became part of a cool, counterculture scene, which in turn helped open doors for him in Paris where he was soon welcomed into the hallowed circles of high fashion. In the darkened galleries, enlivened with a disco ball (apparently a first for the museum) and with music compiled from his New Romantic heyday, Jones’s hats are lit with dramatic effect, the whole experience demonstrating how he’s fueled by the renewable creativity of his craft.
Of the 400 works in the exhibition 170 are hats. There are dozens of major fashion looks that correspond to Jones’s chapeaux by leading designers over the decades, plus the preparatory sketches, photos that reveal his early sense of style, an archive of show invitations, and personal effects, including a scrapbook of Queen memorabilia (the monarch, not the band) from his youth.
If you can name a style, Jones now 67, has likely fashioned it according to his own wondrous whims: countless caps, crowns, bonnets, berets, trilbies, tricornes, fezzes, visors, calèche hoods, and haloes. The variations are astounding: outstretched wings or Saturn’s rings; the poetic placements of flowers and birdlike forms; radical, sculptural volumes swooping upward and outward; surrealist bust forms and garden scenes posed atop the head; recreations of food… wait, is that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, beaded and draped atop a headband?
Over two visits—the first during Paris Fashion Week when many of the elaborate specimens were hiding under protective paper and again just the other day—Jones refused to use the R-word, maybe because “retrospective” sounds flat compared to an autobiography told through ever-changing forms.
Before visitors discover his body of work, they will see a pair of rugby hats in plum velvet and navy blue that belonged to his father. When the younger Jones was growing up near Liverpool, he thought he may play for his school’s team as well. But he veered towards fashion after seeing an exhibition on Charles James at the Victoria Albert Museum and landed at Saint Martin’s School of Art in the fashion program. “There was this big group of girls wearing beige knitwear. And there were three punks on the other side,” he recalled. “Do I go beige knitwear or do I go to punk? I went to punk.” After discovering the hat department, he studied millinery over two summers, and at the end of the program, when he asked what else there was to learn, Jones says that the instructor, Shirley Hex, told him, “I’ve taught you enough. You have to find your own way and your own way will make sense to you.”
It’s easy to spot the designer as a “Blitz Kid” in group photos: his classical, almost doll-like face counterbalanced by a subversive style. Among his pals was Steve Strange of the group Visage who made the first purchase of a Stephen Jones hat. From then on and with the encouragement of his friends, it seems as though his destiny was set. But “really,” Jones says, “it was my friends who guided me rather than having this huge ambition.”
This is where general curator and director of the Palais Galliera, Miren Arzalluz, along with scientific curator Marie-Laure Gutton, who oversees the accessories collections, lean into the London-Paris angle. On one wall of the exhibition, there’s a wall boasting two maps marked up with personal and professional points of interest—from his current boutique on Great Queen Street in London to his first Paris apartment.
Since opening his salon in 1980, Jones has been making hats under his own name. But he’s among the rare figures in fashion whose work has overlapped with many of the greatest designers of our time. This began in 1984 with Jean Paul Gaultier, whom he credits with kick-starting his Paris career. Other early collaborators included Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood, Claude Montana, and Thierry Mugler. Then came John Galliano (starting with Givenchy and still today at Maison Margiela), Walter Van Beirendonck, Marc Jacobs, Azzedine Alaïa, Iris Van Herpen, Raf Simons, Thom Browne, and Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli.
Jones started designing hats for Christian Dior Couture in 1996, when Galliano was installed there, and has contributed to these, plus the ready-to-wear collections through all the successive designers. Each designer has respected his freedom, and in every instance, season after season, he understood how to extend their visions. “Being a milliner, I could really get into their minds,” he explains. “What we make with a designer is something I wouldn’t make myself and something they wouldn’t make themselves. It’s something we give birth to together.”
During our condensed time together, the anecdotes were dizzying. About the hat topped with a reproduction book of Robert Burns poetry, complete with curling pages soaked in tea, that was destined for Stella Tenant who requested “a hat for walking on the moors.” Apparently, Alaïa was an admirer from early on but wasn’t doing shows, so he offered to connect him with another designer, who turned out to be Mugler. And the story doesn’t end there. The radiant dress on display was worn by Pat Cleveland with a halo painted by none other than the artist Peter Doig, a friend from college.
Many of his early collaborators have passed, but the memories and the looks live on. “Doing this, it can feel shocking to think about the people who are no longer here,” he said. “It was Thierry’s sense of theater; Claude’s sense of tailoring and the grand gesture. And Azzedine taking fashion to somewhere you never knew; it was more than perfect… these three, they really formed me.”
Jones insists he is not that nostalgic looking back—“every hat was new once,” he says. And he’s confident that there will always be future hats to make. At one point during our second walkthrough, he politely excused himself. Unbeknownst to him, one of his oldest friends and fellow New Romantic, Kim Bowen, dropped by for a sneak peek. It was one of those time-collapsing moments when the past and present converge. I left them to reminisce as I took my own final spin. As I emerged, I wondered what she thought of the exhibition, as someone who had known Jones for so long. “Bonkers!” she exclaimed. There you have it.
