A Show of Stephen Jones Hats Marks a First for the Palais Galliera

Stephen Jones wearing a tailored black suit and stacking two burgundy hats on his head against a teal gradient background." width="970" height="824" data-caption='Stephen Jones in 2024. <span class="media-credit">© Koto Bolofo</span>'>

Millions have admired the Eiffel Tower, a bird in flight or the rings of Saturn. Or simply enjoyed a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Stephen Jones turned that admiration into hats: “a dream that’s very easy to apply to yourself quickly,” he tells Observer.

This British milliner’s artistry is now on display at Paris’ fashion museum, the Palais Galliera, in an exhaustive review of his decades of work, eighty-six collections in all—its first show of millinery since 1984. Like the creator, it’s an unmatched mix of English eccentricity and French elegance.

It’s also the museum’s only show ever devoted to one accessory, with close to 400 works in the exhibition, including more than 170 hats, as well as related items from Jones’ archives (preparatory drawings, photographs, extracts from fashion shows, etc.) and around forty silhouettes with complete ensembles.

Jones, now 66, has spent his career living and working in Paris and London, hence this unusual bi-national honor. Having been told he’s more French than English, “France has always been an inspiration because of this,” he says. “When I was young, Paris was for me a Technicolor dream, the exact opposite of a childhood spent near the gray northwest sea of England,” he writes in an essay in the exhibition catalog. A 1983 invitation from Jean Paul Gaultier to make some hats for his upcoming show came after the Paris designer saw a fez Jones had made for a Boy George video. “I designed like mad,” Jones reminisces, finishing twenty-five versions of it. “They were an immense success and my key to the world of Paris fashion.”

Schooled in Liverpool, he studied Womenswear Fashion design at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London and began in 1977 at Maison Lachasse under its head, Shirley Hex, spending two summers as an intern. A working-class student, he worked as a fruit and vegetable delivery boy by day and created by night, opening his first shop on October 1, 1980.

He went on to work in haute couture and gradually forged 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’s anything that vaguely resembles a hat, as this extensive show makes clear, Jones has made one or many witty iterations of it: bowlers, cocktail hats (what the British call fascinators), berets and pillboxes, including eleven variations of the top hat, and of every conceivable material: felt, feathers, wire, plastic, satin, velvet, sequins, paper and artificial flowers. Each is named, like Hippolyte, a massive beret in bronze sequins, and one of his personal favorites, Rose Royce (1996), which he describes in a video as “very, very classic, almost a top hat shape—and quite sexy too!”

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He has designed hats for celebrities like Princess Diana, for whom he made berets in 1982, for model Naomi Campbell, rhinestone and black ostrich feathers for Posh Spice, for bands Spandau Ballet, U2, The Rolling Stones and—for the closing of the 2024 Paris Olympics—for Lady Gaga.

The darkly dramatic exhibition, with its brilliant pools of light, feels very much of the era, with an ‘80s soundtrack including David Bowie and Roxy Music. Two videos share more of him, including a possibly surprising glimpse of what one could imagine an impediment to such a finicky, hands-on craft—that his right hand, from birth, is missing its three middle fingers.

The show includes eight windows helpfully explaining his design process from start to finish: research, sketches, prototypes, forms, materials, fabrication, trimming—et voila! It’s truly a delicious surfeit of cheek, imagination and beauty.

Some personal favorites include The Perfect Hat For (2016), a tiny bird hovering invisibly, impossibly over torn, tea-stained pages of poems by Scottish poet Robert Burns, made for the late model Stella Tennant; Cathedral (1995), a stark black sculptural piece; the very meta Sewing (2013), modeled after a huge spool of thread and labeled as “handmade by virgins in London;” and Cocteau (2010), a wire woman’s silhouette complete with rhinestone nipples.

Jones’ legacy has inspired a new eight-month millinery training program on the grounds of Highgrove, the country estate of King Charles III. As student Barnaby Horn, a Métiers d’Art Millinery Fellowship recipient, recently told the British magazine HTSI: “If a fashion collection is the novel, I like to see the hat as a poem or haiku. It’s saying an almost impossible amount in a very small thing.”

“Stephen Jones, chapeaux d’artiste” is on view at the Palais Galliera – Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris through March 16, 2025.