Palais Galliera, Paris’s museum for fashion, is best known for its exhibitions celebrating the industry’s most influential designers: Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Jeanne Lanvin. Now it is spotlighting the man who, for more than four decades, has made hats for those houses and more. “Stephen Jones: Chapeaux d’Artiste,” a retrospective of the British milliner’s work, runs through March 16.
More than 400 items, including 170 hats and 40 fashion looks, are on display in the show, which is the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to accessories in 40 years. The last one was a retrospective of the work of Madame Paulette, a French hat maker who was “the queen of turbans in the 1940s and a legendary figure in Paris fashion,” said Miren Arzalluz, the museum’s director.
Coincidentally, while doing background research for Mr. Jones’s exhibition, the curatorial team found an article from 1986 that referred to Mr. Jones as “the new Madame Paulette.” “We’re circling the circle,” Ms. Arzalluz said.
With the exhibition, Ms. Arzalluz wanted “to show Stephen’s British wit and his French chic and savoir-faire — and how he joins these two worlds through the art of hat making.”
“Stephen Jones is a big name in fashion,” she said, “but not in the big public. This is a way to change that.”
Fancy hats like pillboxes and fedoras have largely been out of fashion since the 1960s, but head coverings of one sort or another are always in style, be it baseball caps, knit beanies or, thanks to “Emily in Paris,” berets.
“I love berets!” the 67-year-old Mr. Jones exclaimed during a tour of the show. He was not kidding. There are several iterations on display, including a royal blue fur mini-beret with a faux-lit cigarette sprouting from the center, a pale pink organza one in the form of an English rose with a diamanté center, and a jaunty scarlet wool one Mr. Jones made for Princess Diana in 1982.
“Everyone looks good in a beret,” he said.
Hat making was not on Mr. Jones’s list of dream careers when he was growing up in Liverpool, England, in the 1960s — the setting of the exhibition’s opening room. But hats were all around him throughout his youth — his mother’s elegant chapeaux, his father’s handsome bowler or the snappy little tasseled caps his father wore while playing cricket, which are in the first vitrine.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Jones moved to London to study women’s wear design at St. Martin’s School of Art. While interning in the tailoring department at Lachasse, a British couture house, he heard raucous laughter coming from the hat department. He went to investigate, stayed and quickly found he was much happier constructing 3-D objects for heads than sewing slithery fabric for the body.
He soon opened a studio in London and made hats for friends like Boy George and Kim Bowen, members of the New Romantics, a youth movement that dressed up extravagantly for outings at dance clubs. The exhibition does its best to conjure the scene, piping in Culture Club’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” as disco-ball lights flicker around the darkened gallery space.
On show are vintage photographs of Jones-behatted club kids, as well as several of the headpieces, including Britannia, a large silver centurion-like helmet with flowing ostrich plumes that he made for Boy George in honor of Lady Diana’s marriage to King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, in 1981.
“He wore it out a lot,” Mr. Jones said.
As wild and witty as that all was, Mr. Jones found his true creative voice when he arrived in Paris in the early 1980s — and that, too, is when the exhibition takes form.
“There is Stephen Jones before Paris and after Paris,” said Marie-Laure Gutton, the Galliera’s accessories expert, who curated the exhibition. “We wanted to show how his work for houses is different from what he does for his own brand — how he responds to the creativity of others. And how their creativity informs his designs.”
Mr. Jones traveled to Paris with his stylish French assistant, Sibylle de Saint Phalle, the niece of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle and a favorite muse. Many of the hats he made for Sibylle or that were inspired by her are in the show, the most bewitching is a red and gold swirl in tulle and jewels that looks like meteorites shooting straight up from her crown.
When they arrived in Paris, Mr. Jones was bowled over by what he saw. “Everybody smoking Gauloises on the Métro, the buildings, the elegance, the grandeur, the chic,” he recalled. “Paris was so different to what I knew. They had silk-covered walls! No silk on the walls in Presbyterian Liverpool.”
Ms. de Saint Phalle took Mr. Jones to meet her designer friends. They began with Azzedine Alaïa, who had recently opened a studio on the Left Bank. Mr. Alaïa told Mr. Jones that he did not do runway shows, but he offered to call his former employer, Thierry Mugler, the star of Paris’s avant-garde fashion scene at the time.
Charmed by Mr. Jones, Mr. Mugler asked him to make something for the model Pat Cleveland, who was then eight months pregnant, to wear as the Virgin Mary in an upcoming show. The hat Mr. Jones designed, which is in the exhibition, was a platter-size gold halo that encircled Ms. Cleveland’s head like Saturn’s rings.
Next stop was the studio of Jean Paul Gaultier, who had clocked Mr. Jones in Culture Club’s 1982 video for “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” In it, Mr. Jones was wearing a red fez of his own design.
As Mr. Jones recalled: “Jean Paul said to me: ‘I love your look. Would you like to create some hats for my next show?’” Mr. Jones sat down and drew a clutch of bright felt fezzes with swishy tassels. Mr. Gaultier hired him on the spot.
“That’s how I started in Paris,” Mr. Jones said.
Soon Mr. Jones was making hats for Claude Montana, who was the head of couture for Lanvin, and for Ms. Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons, which had recently started showing in Paris. He had met Ms. Kawakubo when she approached him in an airport in Alaska during a refueling stop on the way to Tokyo and said, “Stephen Jones, I like your hats.” He made many for her, like the black wool felt toque, designed for a pink jersey pantsuit with matching gloved hands hugging the torso, which is one of the ensembles on display.
Mr. Jones’s longest association has been with the British designer John Galliano. They met in the early 1990s in Paris, and they found such harmony together that they carried on their partnership for decades — at Givenchy, Christian Dior and Maison Margiela and at Mr. Galliano’s namesake label. Among their joint looks in the show: a couture opera coat in gold and blue striped taffeta, for which Mr. Jones crafted enormous daisies to envelop the head, and a gown awash in copper sequins, worn with a copper wire crown by Mr. Jones that was decorated with amber sea horses and scallop shells and framed with a long fringe of copper resin beads.
In the center room, a film is projected of Mr. Jones making a fascinator with a sculpted 3-D Eiffel Tower in black silk taffeta ribbon. Mr. Jones takes a cardboard model of the Eiffel Tower and wraps it with the ribbon in a crisscross manner. Then, with a thimble on his forefinger, he pins the ribbon in place, sews it, adds a shimmery pink tuff of tulle on the top, slides it off the cardboard and onto a black wire Eiffel Tower frame, and affixes it to a wire headband. In a matter of minutes, a hat is born.
Today Mr. Jones is the creative director of hats at Dior — “28 years,” he said proudly — while still freelancing for other houses and running his Covent Garden studio and shop. For while Mr. Jones has carried on his love affair with Paris for decades, he still lives in London.
“When I’m in Paris, I stay in a little hotel around the corner from Dior,” he said. It has silk on the walls.
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