British Vogue: “Everything I Do In My Life, I Try To Put Into A Hat”: Milliner Stephen Jones On His Paris Retrospective
Koto Bolofo
Stephen Jones may have made well in excess of a hundred thousand hats in the course of a 45-year career, but he can still recall the first hat he ever created. It came after transferring from the womenswear course at Central Saint Martins to study millinery under the tutelage of the legendary Shirley Hex (following an internship at the couture house of Lachasse) in 1978: a hat crafted out of his sister’s old blouse and a cereal packet that he had spray-painted silver and blue and embellished with a plastic flower from a petrol station. “I thought it was very Amanda Lear on the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure,” recalls Jones. “She thought it was very punk and modern!”
This modest creation – with its mix of unexpected elements combined with a punk flair – would set Jones on a path towards becoming one of the most inventive and prolific milliners of the last half century. It’s a creative career that has seen him awarded an OBE in 2010, numerous prestigious exhibitions dedicated to him and now with a new retrospective show Stephen Jones, Chapeaux d’Artiste opening at the Palais Galliera this month. Featuring 200 hats and 45 full designer looks and sketches from Jones’s archive, it will mark only the second time in the Galliera’s 129-year history that the museum has staged a show on hats.
Jones’s relationship with Paris began when Jean Paul Gaultier, having seen him in the video for Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” in 1983, initially tried to cast him for his menswear show (which Jones couldn’t make after breaking his leg in a motorcycle accident), then commissioned him to create giant felt fezzes for his spring/summer 1984 collection. That breakout moment elevated the former Blitz Kid from making hats for friends like Boy George, Zandra Rhodes and Steve Strange to establishing enduring collaborations with the likes of Claude Montana, Daniel Roseberry at Schiaparelli, Comme Des Garçons, Azzedine Alaïa, Vivienne Westwood, Thom Browne, Marc Jacobs and young independent designers such as Matty Bovan. Collaborating with such disparate personalities requires a different approach each time: Jones laughs conspiratorially when recounting a story about how Rei Kawakubo took the hats he had made for a Comme Des Garçons show, turned them inside out and put them back to front when they came down the runway. “Rei doesn’t want the thing that I think would be good for her. She wants to be surprised.”
But his most enduring collaboration must be with the house of Christian Dior, with whom he first started working when his friend, John Galliano, was artistic director in 1992. Working together, Galliano would push Jones to new heights creatively – Jones cites having to create chainmail headdresses and armour for Dior’s autumn/winter 2006 haute couture show as his greatest challenge, saying, “I had to consult metal workers and people who worked with aerospace technologies for that one.” Jones has also continued working with Galliano during his tenure at Maison Margiela, recently creating a dramatic feathered headpiece to match the ocean blue haute couture gown that Zendaya wore to the Met Gala in May. “With John, we’re completely aware of all these different things which have gone between us. And we respect what each other has done and we respect how things have changed as well. And then from that friendship, we make the hats. The hats do not come first.”
Meanwhile, the likes of Diana, Princess of Wales, Kylie Minogue and David Bowie have beaten a path to Jones’s atelier, which he set up in Covent Garden in 1980. “Hats are the great unifier,” he says. “You don’t have to be clever to enjoy a hat. It’s the ultimate shorthand.” And how does he stay inspired after all these years? “Everything I do in my life, I try to put into a hat,” he says. “I am very consciously trying to be inspired by everything. Why would you want to shut out something?”
Having worked with curator Miren Arzalluz on the Palais Galliera show for more than six years, Jones was pleasantly surprised at “not just how well it hangs together but also how current it looks.” It’s also helped him rediscover some old favourites from the archive such as the Rose Royce hat from his autumn/winter 1996 collection. “It’s very simple and classic in a way,” he says. “It’s not reinventing the wheel. I’m 67 now, and I quite like things which just look nice.” How, then, would he define the magic of wearing a Stephen Jones hat? He pauses and then ventures, “Hopefully a sense of lightness, a sense of humour and wit about it. It’s a little bit of a costume that takes you to another place.”
