Millions of people admire the Eiffel Tower, birds in flight or the rings of Saturn. Or just enjoy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Stephen Jones turned that admiration into a hat: “A dream that could easily come true very quickly,” he told the Observer.
The British milliner’s artistic talent is now on display at the Paris fashion museum Palais Galliera in an exhaustive retrospective of his work spanning decades and a total of 86 collections since 1984 First millinery show.
It is also the museum’s only exhibition dedicated to a single accessory, with nearly 400 pieces on display, including more than 170 hats, as well as related items from Jones’ archive (preparatory drawings, photographs, fashion show excerpts, etc.). and about forty silhouettes with complete sets.
Jones, 66, has received this unusual binational honor after spending his career living and working in Paris and London. When told that he was more French than British, “France has always been an inspiration,” he said. “When I was young, Paris was to me a colorful dream, the complete opposite of my childhood spent near the gray northwest sea of England,” he wrote in an essay in the exhibition catalogue. In 1983, after seeing the felt hats Jones had made for the Boy George film, Parisian designer Jean Paul Gaultier invited him to make some hats for his upcoming fashion show. “I designed like crazy,” recalls Jones, who completed twenty-five versions. “They were a huge success and were my key into the world of Parisian fashion.”
Educated in Liverpool, he studied women’s fashion design at St. Martin’s College of Art in London and began interning at Shirley Hex under Maison Lachasse in 1977, where he remained for two summers. As a working-class student who worked as a fruit and vegetable delivery boy during the day and created art at night, he opened his first shop on October 1, 1980.
He continued working in haute couture and gradually developed close relationships with some of the world’s leading fashion houses and designers, including Christian Dior, Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Comme des Garçons and Louis Vuitton.
If there’s anything vaguely resembling a hat, as this massive exhibition demonstrates, Jones has already made one or more tongue-in-cheek iterations of it: the bowler, the cocktail hat (what the British call a tiara), the beret Hats and Pillbox Hats, which include eleven top hat variations and every imaginable material: felt, feathers, wire, plastic, satin, velvet, sequins, paper, and artificial flowers. Each has a name, e.g. Hippolytaa huge bronze sequined beret and one of his personal favorites, Rose Royce (1996), which he described in the film as “very, very classic, almost top-hat shaped, and also very sexy!”
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He designed hats for celebrities such as Princess Diana, for whom he designed a beret in 1982; hats for model Naomi Campbell; rhinestones and black ostrich feathers for Posh Spice; Spandau Ballet, U2 , The Rolling Stones and other bands have designed hats; also designed hats for the 2024 closing ceremony.
This dramatic, dark exhibition, complete with gorgeous lighting, is imbued with the feel of the era, and the soundtrack includes an 80s soundtrack from the likes of David Bowie and Roxy Music. Two videos share more about him, including a potentially surprising glimpse into the obstacles to such a finicky hands-on craft – he’s been missing three middle fingers on his right hand since birth .
The exhibition includes eight windows that help explain his design process from start to finish: research, sketches, prototypes, form, materials, fabrication, trimming – and voila! It’s truly the perfect combination of cheekiness, imagination and beauty.
Some personal favorites include perfect hat (2016), a bird hovers invisibly and uncannily over the torn, tea-stained pages of a poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns, dedicated to the late model Stella Produced by Stella Tennant; cathedral (1995), a pure black sculpture; very meta sewing (2013), modeled on a giant spool of thread and labeled “Handmade by London Virgins”; and Cocteau (2010), a wire silhouette of a woman with rhinestone nipples.
Jones’ legacy inspired an eight-month millinery training program at Highgrove, the country estate of King Charles III. As student and Métiers d’Art millinery scholarship winner Barnaby Horn recently told British magazine HTSI: “If a collection is a novel, then I like to think of the hat as a poem or a haiku. It’s about a very small thing. An almost impossible amount is expressed.
“Stephen Jones, Artist Begins” will be on display at the Palais Galliera – Paris Fashion Museum until March 16, 2025.
