On a recent afternoon, Stephen Jones’s Covent Garden showroom displayed around 130 hats on custom-made stands, known as “heads”, painted the same shade of pale lilac as the walls. Hats with turned-up brims, straw hats banded with wide coloured ribbon, low-rise brimless hats in pink tulle and sequins, a black upended flowerpot, a startling feathered aileron, and hats in their loosest form, constructions of pliable wire. They have names like Elope and Squall and Whoosh and Planet.
Lilac is the house colour, judged the perfect shade against which to show hats. Downstairs, where the hats are formed, cut, shaped and decorated, it’s a little cramped, but upstairs in the salon, it’s bright and airy, the only dissonant notes a small jar labelled “PINS ONLY (OTHERWISE DEATH)” and a tower of bulging cardboard boxes. Unsurprisingly, these contain hats, with the likes of Gemini, Coquette, and Song for Europe packed up for shipment to Paris, because Jones – milliner to the Blitz Club and Boy George, to Diana, Princess of Wales and Mick Jagger, to Kylie Minogue and David Bowie – is being honoured with a monographic exhibition at the Palais Galliera, Stephen Jones, Chapeaux d’Artiste .
“For anyone in fashion,” says Jones, “Paris is the centre of the world. We do something different in Britain, and we’re quite happy about that, aren’t we? We don’t want to be Paris nor does Paris want to be us. However, when we’re looking over our shoulder, we know where it a.
