“To Me, the Most Punk Thing Was to Be a Milliner”: Stephen Jones
Hakan Bahar opens the door to Stephen Jones’s enchanted world.
The Palais Galliera treats the hat as a work of art in its own right and opens the door to Stephen Jones’s enchanted world. Holding a unique place in that world, Stephen Jones has left a deep mark on fashion history since the 1980s, highlighting and completing silhouettes. He has become part of the most iconic collections of the great fashion houses. With more than 170 hats, alongside Jones’s archives, photographs, show excerpts, drawings and some forty silhouettes — nearly 400 works in all — the exhibition lets you witness that history first-hand.
Jones grew up in West Kirby, by the sea near Liverpool, in the north-west of England; the foundations of his world were his father’s felt hat, his mother’s headscarf and his grandmother’s floral Sunday-church hat. In 1976 he entered Saint Martin’s School of Art. In the late 1970s, as Britain struggled through economic hardship, he discovered the punk subculture and found himself in that enchanted world where fashion and music intertwined.
And then the New Romantics movement burst onto the music scene. Stephen Jones began spending time at the Blitz Club with some of the movement’s most important figures: Kim Bowen, Stephen Linard and Culture Club’s frontman, Boy George. Known for their striking make-up and extravagant hairstyles, the movement’s members also played a decisive role in fashion. The Blitz Club’s regulars were in fact the Blitz Kids, and for the most important among them — Kim Bowen, the movement’s icon and muse — Jones began designing many hats. This is how a milliner’s story begins.
And then Stephen Jones stepped onto the Paris fashion scene. He and Jean Paul Gaultier first met at the Blitz nightclub in London. In 1983, Gaultier saw Stephen Jones wearing a red velvet fez (my favourite of his iconic hats) in Culture Club’s video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” and invited him to walk in his show. That invitation never came to pass. Later, Gaultier asked him to design hats for his Spring/Summer 1984 womenswear collection, Le Retour des Imprimés. For that collection Stephen Jones produced twenty-five variations on the fez — and won his ticket into Paris fashion.
Stephen Jones also worked with Gaultier on the Autumn/Winter 1984–1985 collection, Barbès. To showcase his talent, Gaultier brought Jones onto the runway at the finale. At the Cirque d’Hiver, Stephen Jones walked with a basket around his neck, and the models, one after another along the runway, dropped their hats into it.
In 1984, at the Zénith in Paris, before an audience of 6,000, Thierry Mugler staged his tenth-anniversary show — the most unforgettable and spectacular show in contemporary fashion — and Jones created designs as a major part of it. In that show, Pat Cleveland, surrounded by a halo, descended from the sky and walked the runway like a Madonna.
“As a milliner, you must immerse yourself completely in another designer’s creative world, adopt their way of thinking and their vision. In that process, you must imagine a hat as the element that completes the silhouette within a whole collection,” says Stephen Jones.
Among Jones’s collaborations, his partnership with Claude Montana lasted until Montana closed his house in 2002. Among these collaborations, with Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons), between 1984 and 2013, Jones designed many avant-garde hats, from asymmetric berets and bunny-eared hats to Meccano crowns. For the Spring/Summer 1994 “Princess Lucretia” collection, an offer came from John Galliano, and he designed the hats. This collaboration created a deep bond between the two artists, and Jones began creating his most spectacular designs as the final touch to the silhouettes of Galliano’s magnificent, history-driven creations.
When Galliano was appointed creative director of Givenchy in 1995, Stephen Jones joined the house as well, and together they created two ready-to-wear and two haute couture collections for Givenchy. In 1987, Geert Bruloot opened a boutique called Louis in Antwerp and supported the six designers known as the Antwerp Six: Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck and Marina Yee. That same year, Bruloot commissioned eight hats from Jones for the Room Service collection, and Jones worked with Walter Van Beirendonck on his Autumn/Winter 1997/1998 collection, Avatar.
His first collaboration with Louis Vuitton was for the Spring/Summer 2006 collection, and he worked with the house’s creative director Marc Jacobs over ten collections in all. Jones describes working with Vuitton in these words: “The idea of creating something light yet magnificent is the definition of luxury.”
He also designs hats for Schiaparelli, which reopened in 2012 after closing in 1954, and has worked with the house since its Spring/Summer 2014 haute couture collection.
But Jones’s longest collaboration is with Dior, contributing to both haute couture and ready-to-wear collections since 1996. Over that time he has worked with the house’s artistic directors John Galliano (1996–2011), Raf Simons (2012–2015), Maria Grazia Chiuri (from 2016) and Kim Jones (2018–2025). Kim Jones inviting Stephen Jones onto the runway at the close of his Autumn/Winter 2022–2023 men’s ready-to-wear collection was a great tribute.
I would like to close with the words of this British designer who devoted his life in fashion to hats:
“Some people write poetry, some people bake cakes. I made a hat — it’s all the same thing really. I realise now that they are largely autobiographical.”