Stephen Jones – the world’s most radical hatter

Stephen Jones is recalling his formative years. “On my student work placement at the couture house Lachasse in Mayfair, I would dress up in a suit, probably from Oxfam, as I liked the idea of being correct,” says the Wirral-born milliner. Svelte, sparkling eyed, Puck-like, he is seated in his book-filled studio at his eponymous millinery shop in Covent Garden. “If I was going to a club – and Central Saint Martins really did teach you how to go to clubs – I would be wearing vinyl trousers and stilettos. This whole idea of conformity and nonconformity is something I learnt to play on,” he explains. “In fact, my dissertation was on conformity and dress.”

This dialogue has given flight to a unique design language that Jones has artfully distilled through hats for more than 40 years. His headwear spans the sculptural and sparse, the flamboyant and fantastical, and is often charged with surreal wit: from a giant felt fez for Jean Paul Gaultier that pours fringe “tears” through eye slits (1984) to a full English breakfast knitted on a beret (2005) or an acrylic Wash & Go cloche (1999) that appears like a gush of water in freeze-frame. He has worked with a huge spectrum of designers: Zandra Rhodes, Thierry Mugler, Rei Kawakubo, Jean Paul Gaultier, Daniel Roseberry, Marc Jacobs and Thom Browne. He met John Galliano at a nightclub in Soho and they have remained collaborators ever since. One of his longest-standing partnerships is still with Dior; after Galliano’s long tenure, Jones has been a constant at the house through Raf Simons’s reign and now with Maria Grazia Chiuri. “I’m the only one who can remember how the photocopier works!” he smiles.

Comme des Garçons’ Kawakubo, another champion, sells his hats at her Dover Street Market stores, and commissions Jones for special handmade pieces. And then there are the bespoke commissions for pop stars (Rihanna, Lady Gaga) and royalty alike. In short, Jones is one of the most influential, enduring designers in the fashion world. “I’m 67,” he says. “How did that happen? It is shocking. The body changes, of course, but I do feel privileged and lucky that I am still around, especially growing up in a generation afflicted by Aids, and knowing many who did not survive.” 

In October, the Palais Galliera in Paris will pay tribute to Jones’s oeuvre with a retrospective featuring 200 hats and 45 full designer looks. “Stephen Jones is the most prominent and influential hat designer-modiste in Paris and internationally,” says Miren Arzalluz, director of the Palais Galliera, who is creating the show alongside lead curator Marie-Laure Gutton. “He continues to be so active, creative and prolific. He is one of these personalities that make fashion what fashion is.” It is a rare accolade for a milliner, she points out. “The last show Palais Galliera staged on hats was about the Parisian milliner, Madame Paulette, in 1984.”

The show will track Jones’s evolution from a teenager in the Wirral (his father was an engineer, his mother a housewife and avid gardener), through his early life and those formative years at Central Saint Martins, where the tutors dismissed his interest in millinery as arcane. “Looking back, no one in their right mind would become a hatmaker,” says Jones, “but maybe I thought millinery was a true punk expression as it was going against the grain.” (This is arguably borne out by the first hat he ever made professionally, for the legendary milliner Shirley Hex: it was crafted out of his sister’s blouse and a packet of cereal, trimmed with a plastic rose that had been given free with a petrol purchase, and sprayed with silver paint.)

At Saint Martins, while others fantasised about “proper Paris fashion”, Jones was in a group of punks. He immersed himself in music, politics and Vivienne Westwood. “Paris seemed irrelevant to what we were living. The UK was broken. When the bin men went on strike I remember Leicester Square as a mountain of black sacks infested by rats. Charing Cross was a dump and most of the shops in Covent Garden were boarded up.” 

Eventually the UK started to recover; music shifted to glam rock and Jones found his inspiration in old 1950s copies of Vogue featuring the extreme haute couture of Balenciaga and Christian Dior. He began to merge the arch attitude of Paris couture with a punk spirit, making hats for his friends, the Blitz Kids and pop stars including Duran Duran, Boy George and Spandau Ballet. He opened his first millinery salon in Endell Street in Covent Garden in 1980, and moved to a boutique on Great Queen Street in 1995.  

“My first hats tended to be smaller and bought mostly by men, because how can you dance in a big hat? But in the shop I welcomed clients ranging from the wife of the governor of the Bank of England to Molly Parkin to Ascot ladies and the most fabulous lady of the night” – he laughs – “who always bought the most expensive designs with cash.” 

He now helms a team that expands from 10 to 25 at peak times, with milliners working from a basement space below the boutique. They design more than 50 hats in each season (encompassing the haute couture Model Millinery collection plus the Miss Jones and JonesBoy ready-to-wear lines) and hand-make around 200 a year for brands and designers. The walls are pinned with fabric samples and sketches, while surfaces support miniature poupée head mannequins, equipment for blocking, stretching and steaming, and pins and trims. The business remains independent; Julia, the head of Model Millinery, has worked with Jones for 31 years. 

Dior is the only haute couture maison that continues to run a millinery atelier. For Chiuri, Jones’s hats – such as the bestselling bucket hat (first introduced by Marc Bohan), iterations of the Bar hat, and the signature berets – are ultimately wearable. For the Dior Cruise collection, staged in the grounds of Drummond Castle in Perthshire in June, Jones created a Balmoral bonnet in collaboration with traditional Scots maker Robert Mackie. “It’s a type of beret supported by a tartan headband,” explains Jones. “Maria Grazia only used one but it said Scotland in an instant. Hats are unusual in that poignancy.” In his hands, even a soft beret can take on different nuances, whether fashioned in noble cotton or wool. “It’s the T-shirt of hats,” he declares of his now-signature headwear (he designed a red one for Princess Diana in 1982).

Zandra Rhodes first commissioned Jones in 1982. “Stephen created fabulous snoods in printed suede hanging with pigtails,” she recalls. “A hat really clinches the look of each collection.” She worked with Jones on 10 more shows.

“There’s only one Stephen Jones, so the minute that the opportunity to work with him came up, there was absolutely no question,” says Daniel Roseberry, creative director at Schiaparelli. “I think his work can be used any different way: sometimes to ground a look and sometimes to send it to the moon.” He adds: “The real joy of working with Stephen is always in the creative process. You might think you know what you want, but after our conversation it feels like he’s opened your eyes to a whole other opportunity, for a look or the collection at large.”

Different designers want different approaches, says Jones. “Rei Kawakubo prefers ‘black pepper on the strawberries’ unexpectedness, whereas John Galliano likes the story, the character.” He was brought in to work on Galliano’s acclaimed Maison Margiela Artisanal collection in January this year “at the last moment – and I made some masks for the men, asking John whether he would like top stitching. John replied that he wanted it in the manner of a little Parisian milliner, perhaps cut with a pair of resharpened scissors, and with maybe a little stain! We speak the same language, which is so different to so much fashion today, which is about a fabulous, perfect product.”

“He is exciting to work with, and every job is of equal relevance, whether it’s a helium balloon hat for Matty Bovan or a giant ostrich hat we did for Giles Deacon that veiled the whole body,” says Katie Grand, creative director, stylist and founder of Perfect magazine, who has worked with Jones for almost 20 years. “His precision is very impressive.” 

During London Fashion Week, Jones presents his own collections at the store. SS24’s Cymru was devoted to Welsh traditions (featuring a saucer hat dotted with daffodils and a tiara sprouting “coal” on springy antennae), while for this AW24, A Muse à Paris is an ode to his first assistant, Sibylle de Saint Phalle (niece of the artist Niki), who helped forge Jones’s future in the French capital. It includes a semi-sheer crin bowler encasing a rose; an Eiffel Tower sculpture; and perky pink-orange vinyl rainhats. At the heart of it all is storytelling – a perspective gained through British art school education. “In Italy it would be about product and fabric; in France about the appearance and allure,” says Jones. “In the US it is about lifestyle; but in the UK it starts with the idea.”

While Jones remembers his mother and aunts dressing up in hats and gloves for Sunday Service, today, apart from weddings, funerals and British Season events, there are few occasions where propriety demands a hat. Yet for the mystique, the sartorial expression and sheer glamour, we continue to be smitten. “The hat is the essence of what that person looks like – it’s the extrait de parfum of fashion, completely,” says Jones. “You look at a person’s face, so a hat becomes supremely important in how we perceive that person.” 

With an intense travel schedule, Jones is often happy to go back to Battersea, his home for 20 years, to his husband Craig West (who has worked in the millinery studio since 1989), and pick up his routine of park runs and walks. He loves London life, and is still in the thick of fashion, attending shows, events and openings. He is a little nervous about this retrospective. 

“It is a strange experience, this amount of navel-gazing, especially having been  brought up at a time when modesty as opposed to self-esteem was considered important,” he says. “Being ‘presented’ is tricky, but I have learnt to be proud of my work too.” Is there an impossible hat? “Always the next one – and working out how to make it possible. That’s the great thing.” 

Stephen Jones, chapeaux d’artiste is at Palais Galliera, Paris, from 19 October to 16 March; palaisgalliera.paris.fr