To each artist his material, and what’s more moving than the useless one, serious frivolity given form. A hat. Stephen Jones carved out a space of freedom in a London that gave none away, and has never since stopped whirling inside it, unhindered, shouting into it and overturning it, in the highest joy and at the highest pitch of his craft. He began on the heads of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler, and still carries the torch at the House of Dior, where he has worked since the John Galliano era. Through it all, he keeps the same knowing half-smile, the look of a man who takes his work with complete seriousness and himself not entirely so. Stephen Jones is President of the ASVOFF 2026 jury.
In Stephen Jones’s office the walls are entirely covered in books, floor to ceiling, the whole memory of fashion displayed behind him. “Oh, that’s only a part, there’s plenty more on the other side,” he quips. Born in West Kirby, on the Wirral Peninsula, and raised near Liverpool, his fascination with beauty was sparked early. “My mother took me to art galleries, and I remember her explaining William Hogarth’s paintings to me, eighteenth-century portraiture, how an embroidered dress would represent wealth. It was often about clothing.” The sense that what we wear speaks for us was in him from the beginning. “What message do you send by wearing a white shirt? Or me, by wearing my navy one? It all means something. And maybe an evening dress means less than a white shirt does. I learned that fairly early on.” Do not expect the well-worn tale of a boy swooning before a single canvas, awakened to some transcendent, saccharine communion with art. From the start it was a matter of perspective, of a bond with the whole rather than the part. “As a child, going to a gallery is a bigger experience than any one painting. You see marble columns. You see things that aren’t like home or school. It’s the overall experience that’s impressive. When you go to the Louvre, for instance, it’s about the whole experience of going to the Louvre, because of everything it represents, the absolute monarchy, all those symbols. And maybe that matters more than the Mona Lisa.” This isn’t provocation; it echoes a long-standing theory of art, that beauty doesn’t always live in the object but in the frame we place around it. A milliner knows this in his hands better than anyone, and Jones spends his days turning the most frivolous of objects into a frame for a face.
“When I was at college in the 1970s, there were huge strikes in London. It was very depressed, and music was the only way out. We felt there was nothing out there for us, so we had to create our own world.” He came down from the north still half a boy, the provinces clinging to his shoes. “I’d never lived in London before, and I didn’t know what to do, or think, or who to see. I just knew music, and that was the great communicator.” The city he walked into was the sick man of Europe – a Britain of runaway inflation and shuttered industry, where a three-day week had recently switched off the lights and the government had just gone to the International Monetary Fund for the largest loan it had ever granted. “It was a poor country, much poorer than France, much, much poorer than Italy. It was nihilistic. There was a vacuum, and we created within that vacuum.” Punk had just detonated, and out of the emptiness a generation set about building a world of its own. Why be afraid when there’s nothing left to lose? “It was like: we do it now, or tomorrow we die. You’re not scared of what you don’t know, and I knew nothing about London, so I thought, let’s get on with it.” Jones is quick to strip away the joke-shop clichés. “Punk had nothing to do with safety pins or rubber trousers. It was a way of carving out an actual path for people, and there’s an idea of hope in it too.” The courage was real, though he won’t dwell on it. “I knew lots of people who got beaten up,” he says of a time – as it still is – when playing with the other gender’s codes could cost you dearly. Throughout, the hierarchy held firm: clothing in service of music. “When you think of David Bowie, you think of the music first, then the incredible look. Same with Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry.” At art school, the path was anything but settled. “I applied to study architecture and decided not to. I didn’t know if I wanted to do ceramics, or interior design, or textiles. But because I was interested in appearance and music, fashion seemed the logical choice. Also, I wanted to go to the party and look great.”
“I made my first hat with an old dress of my sister’s and a box of cornflakes to give it structure, and some plastic flowers. I still have the flowers, because they’re 1970s plastic, and long after I’m dust, and everybody’s dust, these flowers will look exactly the same.”
At Saint Martin’s School of Art in the late 1970s – which became Central Saint Martins a decade later – he studied fashion, one of the very few men in his year. During the summers he was sent to Lachasse, a small London couture House belonging to his tailoring tutor Peter Lewis-Crown, whose milliner, Shirley Hex, would later go on to teach Philip Treacy. “I had no idea this is what my career was going to be. I still don’t! I was a petite main in the tailoring workroom, and next to it was a hat workroom – I just liked the people there. The first hat I made was because I wanted to move ateliers. The première said, well, have you ever made a hat? Make one this weekend, I’ll see it Monday morning and decide.” Hex approved it, charmed by a modernity she took for a deliberate choice. He left Saint Martin’s in 1979 with the craft in his hands and a sharp perception already his own. “When I was a student, we had a film club. We thought these were stupid old films by Fellini – the arrogance of an eighteen-year-old. Our tutor, Rosetta Brooks, said, you’ll like this one, it’s got some beautiful costumes. We were shown a really scratched print, a copy of a copy of a copy, of Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965). The credits said the costumes were sponsored by Bri-Nylon, and because we were punks, we thought – cool, it was inspired by a nylon company. That’s what turned me on to Fellini, and I’ve been obsessed with him ever since.” There’s a lesson buried in all this about the perception of time – one the age of instant gratification has swept away. “There was no internet. If you wanted to find a record, you had to spend a day digging through thousands of old 78s, if you wanted to find Nina Simone singing Strange Fruit. You had to earn it. So when you found it, it was yours, and it really meant something.”
“Thierry Mugler loved drawing. He would do a drawing of a hat, then I would do another in return, then he would correct it. It was like a conversation. Jean Paul Gaultier loved the idea of randomness, of the thing that doesn’t logically fit.”
He threw himself headlong into his career, and a year after graduating, in 1980, opened his own millinery salon in Covent Garden. Paris came for him through Jean Paul Gaultier, who in 1984 gave him his first project for a Parisian House. “First he asked me to model in his fashion show. He’d seen pictures of me in The Face, but I couldn’t do it because I’d broken my leg on a motorbike. A few months later when I visited him to see the film of the men’s show, he asked, would you like to contribute to my women’s collection? I said, well, yes – I hadn’t expected he’d ask. And he said, I’m going out for lunch now, I’ll be back in an hour and a half and I’ll look at your sketches when I return. I was in complete panic, but that’s how I started.” Thierry Mugler followed soon after, and the two temperaments quickly declared themselves kindred spirits. “Jean Paul was more in the British tradition. Thierry was more the Hollywood tradition, where everything matched perfectly – a whole picture, completely detailed.”
“With John Galliano, we’ve managed to keep our professional relationship going. So we have a lovely friendship through hats and through design, which is how we’re still friends 40 years later.”
“I met John because my assistant, Sibylle de Saint Phalle, later became his assistant, so we knew each other socially. He was a big star. He’d moved to Paris, and his assistant Steven Robinson called me and said, John would love to work with you, could you come to Paris, please? This was when he’d been given an atelier by the businessman Fayçal Amor, of the company Plein Sud. I went to visit, we got on well, and we started working together. I saw him last week, and I’m even delivering a hat to him on Sunday!” Side by side they went, from Galliano’s own label to Givenchy, and in 1996, when Galliano ascended the throne at the House of Dior, Jones was anointed House milliner. When Galliano’s Dior came to its abrupt end, Jones stayed on, and has crowned every era since Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri for ready- to-wear and Haute Couture, Kim Jones for Dior Homme, and now Jonathan Anderson across them all. “With Raf, we did some hats, but he wasn’t very ‘hatty,’ because he didn’t want to look like a copy of John.” Chiuri arrived with a brief he still admires. “Maria Grazia said to me, I want to make a hat that every fashionable young girl in the world can wear and I was made Creative Director of Hats. The style that really became a huge hit was the little bob hat in navy blue cotton, lined with Dior Oblique. It became the thing to have, especially during Covid, because people were doing sales appointments over the phone, and you can’t fit a dress over the phone – but if you put on a hat, it looks fun! It was something happy in a time that was very frightening.”
“A hat is spiritual in the abstract sense. It really makes you dream of who you could be. It’s not there to remind you who you are – we already know that. It’s like, oh my God, I can be somebody else, just by putting this thing on my head. And it’s just a hat.”
A hat is among the last toys of fashion an adult can still play with – the one object that turns a fitting into a game of dress-up, and lets a serious person be a child playing in a costume box for an afternoon. “So often you see people advising you to be who you really are, mirror your inner self, and sip some kale juice. At least transform yourself – do something more!” The proof he loves best played out in front of the whole world. At the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024, in the last minutes before the flame went out, the French singer Yseult sang Frank Sinatra’s My Way in a black faille reworking of Dior’s 1947 New Look, crowned by a hat Jones had revived from the House archive. The image drew a wave of online cruelty, which she rose above, and the two have been friends ever since. “Of all the different outfits she’s worn, and everything Dior has made, that was by far the most notable, because suddenly it wasn’t a white person, and it wasn’t a skinny girl. It just showed that everybody’s different – thank God, otherwise how boring the world would be.” Asked if there’s one designer he wanted above all others to work with and never had the chance, he answers quickly. Issey Miyake died in 2022, and the closest they came was an encounter Jones still tells like a small miracle. “I was in Paris, and a car drove past, the window went down, and a guy jumped out and said, excuse me, are you Stephen Jones? I said yes. And he said, I’m Issey Miyake. I almost fell over on the spot, because he was the most famous person in fashion. And he said, a few years ago you made a wedding hat for a junior assistant of mine to go with her dress. I didn’t think the dress was good enough, so I made her a special dress to go with your hat. He said, this afternoon is my men’s show, I’d love you to come.” As he speaks, a book devoted to Miyake’s work watches over the conversation from the far side of the screen, as if the master were keeping an eye on things.
The same generosity runs the other way now. Comme des Garçons’ and Dover Street Market’s CEO, Adrian Joffe, called two years ago about a young pair he was backing, Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran, who show in Paris as Matières Fécales. He was startled to hear that Jones already knew them, from their student days in Montreal. He’d met them there at a festival, and when the pair stood stranded on a stage in the sun, he’d gone and fetched them water. “We hadn’t seen each other in years, and we hugged and hugged and just laughed at how silly and how wonderful life is.” He admires what the otherworldly duo has done since – keeping the savoir-faire and the classical bones of fashion, while giving it all their whole, sincere strangeness.
“Every day is a Dior day.”
Today his work is shown in fashion museums the world over. The Palais Galliera in Paris gave him a retrospective across the winter of 2024 – ‘Stephen Jones, Chapeaux d’artiste’ – the first show the institution had devoted to an accessory in over forty years. His hats sit in permanent collections from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with the largest holding outside his own archive at MoMu in Antwerp. He still crowns every Dior collection, and works on the House’s exhibitions as they travel the world. Going back through the Dior archive, he comes now and then upon his own old handiwork. “You look on the inside and you see the stitches – sometimes the stitches I put in years ago. Quite a strange experience.” He is now chairman of the British Hat Guild, the elder statesman of a craft he did as much as anyone to bring back into fashion.
For this whole portrait I have held back the obvious pun, the small helpless urge to take off my hat to the man who spent a life making them. Just this once, then. Hats off.
