Paris Exhibition Highlights Hatmaker Stephen Jones’ French Touch

PARIS – Many British designers have found fame and fortune in Paris, but none of them have worked for houses as varied as Dior, Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier and Comme des Garçons – to name just a few.

That extraordinary achievement belongs to milliner Stephen Jones, whose 44-year career is the subject of a new exhibition at Palais Galliera, the French capital’s fashion museum. 

Opening on Saturday, the show is called “Stephen Jones, chapeaux d’artiste,” but it could have been “A Tale of Two Cities.”

It’s a deep dive into the personal history of the Liverpool-born creative who rose to attention as part of the Blitz club scene in London in the late ‘70s and landed in Paris in the early ‘80s, quickly establishing himself as the go-to milliner for the hottest designers of that era.

Since then, he has lived and worked with a foot in each city, defying Brexit with a resolutely Francophile worldview.

“What surprised me was actually the simplicity of the story, which was not so obvious to me, which was so obvious to them: It’s about me in Paris, and Paris in me,” Jones told WWD after a guided visit in fluent French, sprinkled with the franglais that is the lingua franca of Brits working in Paris. 

“When I’m in London, I want to be in Paris. When I’m in Paris, I want to be in London. It’s the mix of the two that is interesting because London is a masculine town and Paris is a feminine town. In fashion, you need both,” he said.

Featuring 170 hats, the show toggles between the Anglo and French influences in his work: a Union Jack bowler hat here, an Eiffel Tower fascinator made of swirling black ribbons there. 

It also showcases some 40 full looks, illustrating his Zelig-like ability to mold his designs to the requirements of wildly different designers. 

For Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, he might use dramatic plumes of black peacock feathers, while for womenswear designer Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, he’ll offer wearable variations on the classic French beret. 

A Claude Montana look might require a hat as graphic as a simple line, while a John Galliano design for Maison Margiela will be topped with a skull hood plastered in rhinestones and paste jewels. 

“Each one, for me, is like an entry into a different world,” he said.

“World of Gaultier is so different to World of Dior, which is so different to World of Schiaparelli, but still at the same time, I take a hat out of a box for a fitting, and my heart is still in my mouth: ‘Are they going to like it or not?’ That’s something that is still there, unchanged, ever since I started working,” he added.

It’s the first time in 40 years that the museum has devoted an exhibition to hats.

“We really wanted to highlight accessories and the fashion professions that are perhaps less known to the general public than couturiers and designers,” said Marie-Laure Gutton, head of the accessories collections at Palais Galliera and scientific curator of the show.

“Our hat collection is substantial. We have 4,000 pieces, but we didn’t necessarily want to approach it from a strictly historical point of view. The contemporary angle was more compelling for us, and among contemporary hat designers, Stephen was the one with the deepest links to Paris fashion,” she added.

While Jones may not be a household name, visitors will probably have seen his creations, ranging from the soft berets worn by Princess Diana in the ‘80s to Rihanna’s bishop hat for the 2018 Met Gala. He holds the official title of creative director of hats at Dior, where he has worked for almost three decades.

While Jones loaned most of the designs on display from his personal archive, some are juxtaposed with historical pieces from the museum’s collection. 

The most extraordinary is a Phrygian cap, also known as a liberty bonnet, dating back to the French Revolution – still in its original box with a red wax seal. Jones’ take on the style, which has been back in the news as the mascot for the Paris Olympics, resembles a pink beanie. 

Unlike his previous museum shows, which included “Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones” at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2009, the Galliera show features a trove of artifacts and mementoes, from his father’s rugby caps from the 1930s to the invitation to the inaguration of his first store in 1980. 

“This is really personal,” Jones said. “All this depth of things have never been represented.”

As a fashion design student at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, Jones hung out with New Romantic bands including Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Visage, whose members Steve Strange and Rusty Egan founded the Blitz Club as an antidote to the gloom of economically depressed England in the late ’70s. 

Club kids would compete to put together the most glamorous and outlandish looks. That’s how Jones, wearing a fez, ended up in the video for Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” catching Gaultier’s attention. Their first collaboration in 1984 featured fez hats dripping with colored fringe. 

Jones stumbled into hat design while interning at British couture house Lachasse, where he met his mentor Shirley Hex.

“When I left college, there were a lot of fashion designers, but there wasn’t a single milliner. I thought, if I want to be a punk, it’s more punk to be a hat designer, because nobody’s interested in it,” he said. 

The festive display comes with its own soundtrack, a specially compiled playlist that can be downloaded with a QR code. “I think it’s the first time the Galliera has put up a glitter ball,” said Jones, revealing that he also sang in a band called Pink Parts. 

Some exhibit labels are designed for kids, and there is an AI app that allows visitors to virtually try on hats.

“I wanted something that somebody could go around in five minutes, or spend two hours going around –  somebody who knows something about fashion, or somebody who knows nothing about fashion at all,” Jones explained. “Hats are eye candy. Everyone can appreciate them.”

Fashion aficionados will find plenty to delight in. There is an Elsa Schiaparelli shoe hat that belonged to Gala Dalí, one of only three known surviving examples of the original design. 

Jones has created several interpretations of the Surrealist concept, including a stylized version made for Schiaparelli’s current creative director Daniel Roseberry. 

Then there is his tweed crown for Vivienne Westwood’s fall 1987 collection. The two had an inauspicious meeting when Jones accidentally stepped on her toes when dancing at a nightclub, but he would go on to help her develop her infamous mini-crini skirt. 

One exhibition case highlights his use of unusual materials, from a mohawk hat made with Barbie doll legs to a conceptual assemblage of yellowed book pages.

Time and again, Jones harks back to the history of French haute couture, which has inspired him since his days as a punk at Saint Martins, when he discovered a box filled with old issues of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazines. 

“I remember looking through them, and there were all these extraordinary women wearing Fath, Dior, Balenciaga,” he recalled.

“They all had a really strong attitude and that attitude, I felt, was really punk. Who else had an attitude like that? Johnny Rotten. It certainly wasn’t the world of country cashmere. It was about being on point, being opinionated, being geometric,” Jones added. 

“That was a huge inspiration for me and also, I loved all the stories of how it was made, and the technique and the craft,” he said. “It’s that ‘Emily in Paris’ myth of haute couture, or ‘Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris.’ There’s so much literature about the idea of Paris from abroad. Paris is a symbol of everything.”