Millions have admired the Eiffel Tower, the flying bird or the rings of Saturn. Or simply enjoy a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Stephen Jones turned that compliment into a hat: “it’s a very easy dream to apply to yourself immediately,” he told the Observer.
The art of this British milliner is now on display at the Paris fashion museum, Palais Galliera, in a comprehensive review of decades of his work, eighty-six collections in all—the milliner’s first exhibition since 1984. As a creator, it is an incomparable match for the mixture of English eccentricity and French elegance.
It is also the only museum exhibition ever devoted to a single accessory, with nearly 400 works on display, including more than 170 hats, and related materials from Jones’ archives (preparatory drawings, photographs, extracts from fashion shows, etc.) and forty silhouettes – complete ensembles.
Jones, now 66, has spent his career living and working in Paris and London, hence the unusual binational honor. Having been told that he speaks more French than English, “France has always been an inspiration because of this,” he says. “When I was young, Paris was my Technicolor dream, the exact opposite of the childhood I spent by the gray seas of northwest England,” he wrote in an essay in the exhibit. A 1983 invitation from Jean Paul Gaultier to make hats for his upcoming show came after the Parisian designer saw a fez Jones had made for a Boy George video. “I designed like crazy,” Jones recalls, completing twenty-five versions of it. “They were a huge success and my key to the world of Parisian fashion.”
Educated in Liverpool, she studied Womenswear Fashion design at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London and started in 1977 at Maison Lachasse under her mentor, Shirley Hex, spending two summers as an apprentice. A low-level student, he worked as a fruit and vegetable delivery boy during the day and created at night, opening his first store on October 1, 1980.
He continued to work in haute couture and gradually built close links 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 is such a thing as a hat, as this extensive exhibition makes clear, Jones has made one or more replicas of it: play hats, cocktail hats (what the British call fascinators), berets and pillboxes, including eleven variations of the hat. the highest. , and in all imaginable materials: felt, feathers, wire, plastic, satin, velvet, sequin, paper and artificial flowers. Each one is named, just like him Hippolytea large beret with bronze sequins, and one of his personal favourites, Rose Royce (1996), which he described in the video as “very beautiful, very old-fashioned, almost top-hat—and fascinating, too!”
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He has designed hats for celebrities such as Princess Diana, who made berets for them in 1982, model Naomi Campbell, black ostrich feathers for Posh Spice, for the bands Spandau Ballet, U2, The Rolling Stones and—the closing of 2024. Paris Olympics – for Lady Gaga.
The spectacular show, with its sparkling pools of light, is very reminiscent of this era, with an ’80s soundtrack including David Bowie and Roxy Music. The two videos share a lot about him, including the surprising least one might imagine of an obstacle to such a difficult craft—that his right hand, since birth, is missing its three middle fingers.
The exhibition includes eight windows that help explain his design process from start to finish: research, drawings, prototypes, forms, materials, construction, cutting-et voila! It is really a sweet surfeit of cheek, imagination and beauty.
Some personal favorites include The Perfect Hat For (2016), a small bird flies invisibly, improbably over the sad, tea-smeared poems of Scottish poet Robert Burns, made for the late model Stella Tennant; The cathedral (1995), black engraving; the same Sewing (2013), modeled on a large rope and labeled “handmade by girls in London;” again Cocteau (2010), a silhouette of a lacy woman with rhinestone nipples.
Jones’ legacy inspired a new eight-month millwright training program at Highgrove, King Charles III’s country estate. As student Barnaby Horn, recipient of the Métiers d’Art Millinery Fellowship, recently told the British magazine HTSI: “If a fashion collection is a novel, I like to see the hat as a poem or a haiku. It means an almost impossible amount to something so small.”
“Stephen Jones, chapeaux d’artist” is on view at the Palais Galliera – Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris until March 16, 2025.
