Hats Off to Milliner Stephen Jones, the Subject of a Sweeping New Exhibition at Paris’s Palais Galliera

Of the 400 works in the exhibition 170 are hats. There are dozens of major fashion looks that correspond to Jones’s chapeaux by leading designers over the decades, plus the preparatory sketches, photos that reveal his early sense of style, an archive of show invitations, and personal effects, including a scrapbook of Queen memorabilia (the monarch, not the band) from his youth.

If you can name a style, Jones now 67, has likely fashioned it according to his own wondrous whims: countless caps, crowns, bonnets, berets, trilbies, tricornes, fezzes, visors, calèche hoods, and haloes. The variations are astounding: outstretched wings or Saturn’s rings; the poetic placements of flowers and birdlike forms; radical, sculptural volumes swooping upward and outward; surrealist bust forms and garden scenes posed atop the head; recreations of food… wait, is that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, beaded and draped atop a headband?

Over two visits—the first during Paris Fashion Week when many of the elaborate specimens were hiding under protective paper and again just the other day—Jones refused to use the R-word, maybe because “retrospective” sounds flat compared to an autobiography told through ever-changing forms.

Before visitors discover his body of work, they will see a pair of rugby hats in plum velvet and navy blue that belonged to his father. When the younger Jones was growing up near Liverpool, he thought he may play for his school’s team as well. But he veered towards fashion after seeing an exhibition on Charles James at the Victoria & Albert Museum and landed at Saint Martin’s School of Art in the fashion program. “There was this big group of girls wearing beige knitwear. And there were three punks on the other side,” he recalled. “Do I go beige knitwear or do I go to punk? I went to punk.” After discovering the hat department, he studied millinery over two summers, and at the end of the program, when he asked what else there was to learn, Jones says that the instructor, Shirley Hex, told him, “I’ve taught you enough. You have to find your own way and your own way will make sense to you.”